


The Source of Darkness

by shuofthewind



Series: The Making of Monsters [4]
Category: Daredevil (TV), Jessica Jones (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Season/Series 02, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Darcy Never Met Jane, Bechdel Test Pass, Canon-Typical Violence, Catholic Guilt, Cliffhanger Conga Line, End Racial Stereotyping, Eventual Smut, Everyone Needs More Sleep, F/M, Female Friendship, Gen, Japanese!Kate Bishop, Male-Female Friendship, Moral Ambiguity, Polyromantic Matt Murdock, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Protect All Of Them 2K5Ever, The Anti-Fridge AU, Trans!Kate Bishop, Vigilante Darcy Lewis, Women Being Awesome
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-24
Updated: 2017-08-20
Packaged: 2018-05-28 21:16:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 16
Words: 329,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6345694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shuofthewind/pseuds/shuofthewind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's been nearly a year. Really, things should stop piling up. If they could stop doing that, you know, that would be great. But it's her life; when do things ever not implode?</p><p>[In which Darcy Lewis meets assassins, attempts to bake and fails, has the rug ripped out from under her feet, gets a new nickname, argues a lot, questions everything, snags a new toy, and starts wondering if she ought to look into a quiet life in Milwaukee. Though, you know. She'd probably be bored.] </p><p>[A sequel to <em>The Price of War</em>. Heavy spoilers for both <em>The Price of War</em> and for season two of <em>Daredevil</em>. Darcy POV, some alternating. Season 2 Rewrite.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Mercury in Retrograde

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so. It's happening. 
> 
> Some notes:  
> \--I will not be establishing trigger warnings at the top of chapters anymore. Instead, they will be labeled "content warnings." If you do have any particular triggers, please let me know, but really, if you can watch Daredevil, you should be okay with anything I can throw at you.  
> \--this fic will have heavy spoilers for season 2. Let me repeat that: _this fic will have heavy spoilers for season 2._ Do not read this if you have not been crazy, like me, and sped through the whole thing in a weekend. Just. Don't.  
>  \--I post status updates on my FB page, Shu of the Wind, and have a Tumblr at shu-of-the-wind. Any message you desperately have to get to me can reach me there.  
> \--I _love_ all fanwork, including art, meta, headcanons, spin-off fic, anything you want, basically. Throw it at me, I promise I will probably freak out and love all over you. Just don't ask me for spoilers.  
>  \-- _The Making of Monsters_ has been split into two series: this one, and [SIDEFICS], which you can find on my profile. I have been writing a lot of DD stuff, and I didn't want this series to get too cluttered. I also have a [REMIX] series, where little AUs get posted. (First one is with Bucky, if that attracts you at all.)  
>  \--as usual, this will be unbeta'd.  
> \--I WILL NOT BE POSTING AS FAST AS I DID LAST YEAR. I work full time as an English teacher in Japan, and my life is going to be very busy once April hits and the school year starts up again. I'm going to try to keep it to once a week.  
> \--All of you are beautiful people and I love you. 
> 
> CONTENT WARNING: blood, guns, gunshots, canon-typical violence, headshots, panic attacks. 
> 
> We just hit the ground running here and it's all Frank's fault. Goddamn puppydog jarhead.

_What is a hero? Courage, strength, morality, withstanding adversity?_  
_Are these the traits that truly show and create a hero? Is the light truly_  
_the source of darkness or vice versa? Is the soul a source of hope or despair?_  
_Who are these so-called heroes and where do they come from?_  
_Are their origins in obscurity or in plain sight?_  
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky, _Notes from Underground_

 _Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.  
_ —H.G. Wells, _The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman_

“So,” Karen says. “It’s official. We’re broke.”

She’s been half-expecting it for weeks now—she’s not stupid, of course she has been—but it still hits her like a punch. Darcy shuts her eyes for a moment, and breathes. This, she thinks, is what happens when you help the helpless. Usually the helpless can’t afford to help you back. Most of the time, the helpless can’t even afford to help themselves, which is why they need help in the first place. Yeah, it’s something they’ve known since the start, but knowing that is different from hearing it. Knowing that is different from seeing it. _We’re broke._

“Ah,” Foggy says, and wipes at the back of his neck. He makes a disgusted little sound, and gropes for something to wipe the sweat off with. “I wondered.”

“Like, really badly broke,” Karen says, closing the door as much as she can so Marino and Jacinto and Maxwell and everyone else in the main office won’t actually be able to hear them. Darcy shifts her weight, and winces a little. She’d popped a rib rolling off of a rooftop yesterday, and yeah, it’s not broken or cracked or anything— _know what those feel like, now, thanks very much_ —but it kinda aches anyway. Outside, the shuddery little terrier makes an unhappy sound, and Mr. Marino puts it onto the floor. _If you pee on my plants,_ Darcy thinks, watching it out of the corner of her eye, _I will kick you out the window and then we definitely won’t get more peach cobbler. We’ll be Nelson, Murdock, and Puppy-Killer Lewis._ “There are a bunch of bills on the table from…maybe the past two months or so, all past due. And, um. This month’s should be coming in the mail in the next week or so.”

“There is, however, pie,” Foggy says. “Which I intend to consume at the first possible opportunity.”

“I don’t think the goons from the IRS will take pie as a peace offering.”

“Are you joking? That pie is mine.”

“Guys,” Darcy says, and Karen folds her arms over her chest. Then she unfolds them, because yeah, it’s kind of way too hot to be doing anything like that right now. At Darcy’s shoulder, Matt shifts, and puts himself in the way of the fan on her desk. “The pie is irrelevant. Karen?”

“I mean.” Karen throws her hands in the air. “There’s a lot of stuff we should have been doing, probably months ago, but like…we need paying clients. Not—not IOUs or more bananas or pie or anything else, just, clients which can, you know, add money to the coffers and possibly make things easier for us. Literally the only option we have right now, because at the end of the month, if we don’t have that? No lights, no water, no, you know. Office. If we can’t pay rent.”

“It’ll work out,” says Matt. It’s the first thing he’s said since coming into the office, really, and he sounds oddly cheerful about it. Like: _Yay, we’re gonna die!_ Which is…highly unlike Matt and should probably be freaking her out more. “We’ll make it work.”

“I mean, sure, we can try. I’d just like to have some kind of guarantee that we’ll be able to keep doing this beyond the next three weeks or so.”  Karen lets out a breath. “I haven’t told Kate, before you ask. I’m feeling like that’s a last resort kind of thing, considering everything.”

Tell Kate Bishop, baby millionaire, that their toddling law firm is currently so deep in the red that it’s looking up at someone’s arteries? Yeah, no, not a good plan. At least not right away. It’s not that Kate wouldn’t leap on the chance to help, she thinks, just that…well. She knows how Ben felt about Kate and Doris heading to a new nursing home, now. Darcy pushes her glasses up away from her forehead, and rubs at her eyes. There’s been no point in make-up the past few days. She can’t afford the expensive non-melty stuff, and it’d all just run down her face in twenty minutes. _105 and still climbing, Jesus, New York._ “Yeah, no, don’t tell Kate. Um. Keep the envelopes in Foggy’s office, she never goes in there.”

“Too overwhelmed by my charm, poor thing,” says Foggy, and leans next to Matt against Darcy’s desk. There’s literally _no_ air circulation in the room anymore with both of them there in front of the fan. They’re _bastards._ “Good a hiding place as any.”

“I need to go to the DA’s office today to talk to Jen, anyway, so I’ll—I’ll sniff around, okay? Maybe I’ll get lucky.” She digs her nails into the back of her neck. “Foggy, you wanted Marino and Zeus?”

“Zeus?”

“Hey, in your own words, that tiny, tiny terrier _humped a statue until completion_ , Karen,” Darcy says. “Of St. Francis, no less. That doesn’t scream _I’mma stick my prick into this bull because I am the king of Olympus_ to you?”

“I think the dog’s name is Martie, actually,” says Karen, but she’s smiling, so, whatever. It works. She’s been really pinch-faced lately. Impending debt, Darcy reasons, will do that. “But Zeus definitely works.”

“I will receive the King of Olympus and his supervisor in my office in five minutes,” says Foggy. “I need to deal with the actual buckets of sweat and disgustingness running down the back of my neck right now. Darcy, you want Maxwell or Jacinto?”

“Maxwell. I’ll take him in the conference room, it’s easier to clean if he bleeds.”

“Or if you bleed,” Foggy says. “You know, just saying.”

“I’m fine.”

“You say that now.”

“Which leaves me with Miss Jacinto.” Matt straightens, and Jesus god _finally_ there is cool(er) (not really) air blowing in her direction. He touches his hand to the small of her back, and Darcy tips into it. “Karen, you said we have ten o’clocks? How many?”

“I’m pretty sure we’re only gonna find that out at ten o’clock,” says Karen. She knocks the door open again with her hip. “You want notes?”

“Please,” says Darcy. “If you’re offering. I feel like a bar fight needs a little more direct note-taking than horny puppy-dogs, and Matt has the recorder.”

“Did you see that, Matt? She just threw us right under the bus. _Right_ under it. Jesus, Lewis,” says Foggy, and Darcy dances out of the way of the pair of them to grab her notebook and her pens. Zeus, at least, has had the good manners not to pee on her floor, yet. “That was _cold_.”

“Yeah, well.” Darcy turns just enough that none of the clients can see them, and hooks her fingers through Matt’s for a moment. “I’m good at that. Karen, where’re the files?”

“Out here.”

They’re ushering Mr. Maxwell into the conference room (“Cold water? You’re fucking beautiful, ladies, best thing that’s happened all week—”) when Karen catches Darcy by the arm, and says, “Darcy, I really don’t—I don’t like how close we are to the edge right now.”

Darcy peeks at her through her hair. Karen’s been able to snag non-running mascara, or, at least, she’s made it last long enough that it doesn’t really matter if she wears it during basically the hottest summer New York’s had since Darcy moved out here. ( _Eleven fucking years, you monster, and now you want me to suffer? Now, when I run around all night in a leather catsuit? Seriously? Is this karma?_ ) Her nails, though—she’s bitten them down to the quick. Darcy makes herself smile. “We’ll figure it out, Kare.”

“That’s Matt’s brand of bullshit, not yours, quit spouting it.”

“I know. I’m sorry.” She breathes, in through her nose, out through her mouth. “I’ve been meaning to ask for a few weeks, it just kept getting pushed aside. How deep are we?”

“Pretty bad. I wanted to be sure before I said anything, but—pretty bad.”  When she presses her fingers into Darcy’s elbow, she pushes right into a bruise. “You really think Jen will have something?”

Darcy stares hard at the ceiling for a moment. Foggy’s joking with Mr. Marino, and the dog, thankfully, is back up off the floor. “I think we better hope she does,” she says in a low voice. “Otherwise things are gonna get sticky.”

Karen searches her face. Then, slowly, she nods, and lets go. “You want me to go with you?”  

“To see Jen?”

“Mm.” She frets with her bracelet. “I can, if you want.”

 _More like you’ll stress if you don’t._ “Two o’clock. Can you?”

“I’ll manage it.”  

“You’re a queen,” Darcy says, and knocks her shoulder into Karen’s. It could be accidental, from an outside observer. When she turns to the door of the conference room again, Mr. Maxwell is whistling an Irish shanty between his teeth. “Now, Mr. Maxwell—I have absolute faith that you did not, in fact, start this fight, but I’d like very much to know how it _did_ start. So—from the beginning.”

.

.

.

She’s not sure what the beginning is, anymore.

Maybe the beginning is Fisk rotting in jail and Vanessa hiding somewhere on the eastern seaboard, ferreted away somewhere not even Ben’s nosiest mice can quite work out.

Maybe the beginning is having to turn down a dinner invitation from Elena Cardenas because she has a black eye that won’t stop swelling, and won’t hide under cover-up like it needs to.

Maybe it’s Ben Urich, _The Urich Report_ , a website she visits three times a day and still can’t keep up with the rate of production, all of Ben’s moles and whisperers feeding information into his ears faster than even Lilith and Daredevil can manage.

Maybe it’s Kate, calling her on the rooftop of the Catholic church to let her know she’ll be late a day, that Clint’s being a bastard and that someone needs to look in on Lucky and Yoko just in case she doesn’t finish before midnight.

Maybe the beginning is Jen, buried so deep in her work that it’s almost impossible to keep track of her, digging deeper and deeper into something that she won’t talk to any of them about.

Maybe it’s Karen, who still calls her in the middle of the night sometimes to ask if Darcy can walk with her. It’s only ever silent, Karen’s lips pressed together and her hands locked behind her back, but Darcy goes when she can. They pace back and forth by the waterfront, and never talk about it.

Maybe the beginning is Foggy, hissing a little when he sees the scar on Darcy’s hand. It’s been nearly a year and he still does it, puts his teeth together and breathes out like he’s been kicked when he notices the mark, between her tendons and her bones. Sometimes she wears cover-up, just to stop it from happening. Every time she does, though, it feels like a lie.

Maybe the beginning is waking up after chasing down a trio of diamond thieves in the middle of the New York summer to find that Matt has his fingers curling into her hair, his face turned to the window and the light. When she’d lifted her head to look at him, he’d turned back to her and said _hello_ in the quiet, absent way that’s more habit than thought, the way that makes her smile every time because _yes, hello, you’re still here._ Even at seven in the morning with the A/C on and a fan going, it’d been way too hot to kiss him, so she’d just caught his hand and held onto it and curled back around the pillow.

Maybe the beginning is a bullet in Central Park on a warm, sunny day in April. Maybe it’s Matt on her fire escape, hands up as she holds a gun on him. Maybe the beginning is Melvin, or Nobu, or Leland Owlsley; Madame Gao, or Wesley, or even Richard Goodman. Maybe the beginning isn’t the beginning at all, but the middle, something that’s been in motion for months or years or decades, Eli and Stick and chemicals trailing across the asphalt. Maybe the beginning is something entirely different.

Or maybe she’s just being dramatic.

.

.

.

The thing about New York City is that if you think the justice system is twisted anywhere else in the United States, New York will just…fuck you up even worse. There’s a reason why a lot of people decide not to take the New York bar, especially if they want to go into criminal law. _Which means,_ Darcy thinks, knocking the door of the courthouse open with her hip and holding it open for Karen to slip inside, _that the three of us are masochists of the first order._ The Supreme Court, in New York, isn’t the top court in all the land—that’d be the Court of Appeals, which is twisted and weird and confuses anyone who comes in from other states. But anyway, it means that when Jen tells her “meet me at the courthouse,” she’s talking Supreme, and since Jen’s not answering her phone at the moment, there’s not a lot Darcy can do other than take the subway down to Centre Street and cry a lot at how much sweat has soaked through her nice shirt.

“This place always creeps me out,” Karen says, as a clerk of court ducks by them without looking up from his papers. “I feel like people are going to drop down out of the ceiling and like…eat us.”

“Please. That’d involve actually realizing we exist.” Darcy shifts her messenger bag on her shoulder. “I think Jen has a thing in Courtroom Ten, so, we can _Harry Potter_ it and wander over there or we can go and bug Angie at the desk. Unless you wanted to talk to me about something.”

Karen fists her hand around the straps of her bag, and turns so that her hair is hiding her eyes. “We should probably ask Angie where Jen is just to be sure. She always knows.”

 _Because that’s not suspicious as fuck, Page._ “Yeah,” Darcy says. “Come on.”

Angie Huang isn’t exactly a paralegal. She’s not a clerk of court, either, or if she was, she isn’t anymore. She just kind of exists, propped up at a desk just outside of the restricted areas of the Supreme Court on Centre Street, though she occasionally materialized in the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse a few buildings down, too. She’s short, and round, of indeterminate age and sexuality, and she scares the living god out of all the baby clerks, ADAs, defense attorneys, and witnesses that she comes into contact with. For obvious reasons, she’s probably Darcy’s favorite person in the Supreme Court building outside of Jen herself. She stops on the way over to Angie’s desk to grab a coffee for her, though, because there’s really no sense at all in stabbing the tiger in the eyeball.

“Peregrine,” Angie says, and eyes her for the moment over the top of her computer screen. Her shirt is a truly terrible shade of coral, and Darcy’s pretty sure she picked it just to make sure people noticed how ugly it was. It seems like a very Angie thing to do. Her earrings are shaped like hibiscus flowers. “Been a few weeks. You bring me anything?”

“I always bring you things.” When Darcy sets the coffee on the desk, Angie doesn’t touch it. Still, she grunts a little, like she’s accepted the offering. “Things have been busy down in the Kitchen.”

“Yeah, I heard.” Angie peers at her through her bangs again. “Caught your closing in the nail salon thing. Worked out well for you.”

“Yeah, well, it better have. Eunji needed the closure. And plus, you know, there’s a certain kind of satisfaction in getting to kick the verbal crap out of someone who’s basically running a sweat shop, especially when the DA has done exactly shit about it.” Darcy shifts her bag on her shoulder again. Behind her, Karen’s watching one of the ADAs arguing with a witness, or something, she has no idea what they’re doing, just that they’re hissing a lot in quiet voices a few dozen yards down the hall. “How’s Hei Hei?”

“He’s pulling his own fur out again,” says Angie. “Truesmith gave him an anxiety attack the other day by stubbing his toe. What do you want?”

“So Truesmith doesn’t get a bird name, now?”

“Not if he gives my monkey anxiety.”

“Preach.” Darcy sips at her own coffee. “I was looking for Jen, she around?”

“Toucan’s still in court. She should be out in a bit, though, Moustakas’s grandkid has food poisoning and she wants to get home earlier rather than not.” Angie takes the coffee without a word, and sets it aside, on top of a pile of papers stuck with a pink post-it reading _bullshit._ “You can wait.”

“You’re a peach, Angie.”

“We don’t talk about peaches, peregrine. We’re not that close.”

“Aye-aye, captain.” She touches Karen’s elbow. “C’mon. We’re waiting. Jen should be back soon.”

“Cool.” Karen manages a smile. “Hey, Angie.”

“You look like shit, my dove,” says Angie, and watches them for a second or two. Then she gestures Karen closer—Karen, not Darcy—and opens her desk drawer. “Don’t eat this here,” she says, but she presses two Hi-Chew sticks into Karen’s palm. “Truesmith’ll try to take them.”

Karen curls her fingers around the candies, and her smile gets a little wider. “Thanks, Ange.”

“Go away,” Angie says, and puts her earbuds back. Darcy nudges Karen in the side with her elbow.

“Charmer.”

“Shut up.” Karen drops down onto the bench across from Angie’s desk. “Darcy, you really think Jen will have something?”

“You live with her, what do you think?”

Karen sucks her teeth. “I mean, yeah, I think so. She’s been getting a lot of bigger cases, lately. You know that, you’ve talked about them as much as you can, the pair of you, but like—she doesn’t come back to the apartment most nights. Which is kind of nice, just because it means I get time to work on things without having to talk to people or be social, but like…I worry she’s kind of overworking herself. She’s muttering in Greek a lot.”

Which is never a good sign, with Jen, and they both know her well enough to know that. “You ask her what it was?”

“Like she ever actually explains it when you do?”

Darcy dips her head, and hooks her hair back up out of her face again. “I’ll ask her. This was supposed to be a lunch meeting anyway, not that she ever, you know, actually keeps those anymore. I would’ve thought she’d be the one up for Reyes’s second-in-command, not Tower, just with the way she’s been going. But Tower knows how to grease some palms, I’d guess.”

“Should you be saying that in the Supreme Court?”

“Like the rest of these chuckleheads aren’t thinking it? Please.” She props her chin up in her hands. “I mean, more power to him, if he wants to be the one to deal with the Iron Lady. Jen just works twice as hard as anyone else in this damn office, that’s all.”

“No, I know.” Karen drops down next to her on the bench, and then hisses. “Darcy, you’re bleeding.”

“Again?”

“Can you not do the snarky thing right now? We’re kind of in the middle of the Supreme Court, you bleeding from suspicious places doesn’t exactly help anything.”

“I didn’t even realize I was bleeding, but okay.” Darcy holds very still as Karen folds up a Kleenex, and settles it on the back of her ear. Which, kudos to the Page, she would _never_ have noticed that one. She’s pretty sure no one else would have either, but that’s neither here nor there. “I was kind of rolling around in glass last night, I’m surprised there’s not more.”

“You sure you want to talk about this here?”

“Is anybody listening?” Darcy presses the Kleenex down over the back of her ear. “We’re small fish in here, Kare. Nobody pays attention. Besides, if someone _had_ noticed me bleeding, all I would have had to say was _what the hell_ and maybe make noises about a bike accident. That usually works.”

“There are only so many times you can get into a bike accident before someone starts worrying you’re jumping in front of them.”

“I know.” Karen still looks worried, though, so Darcy leans into her shoulder, humming a little. “Everything’s okay, Karen. We’re in the clear, still.”

“How many hours did you sleep last night?”

“Four, maybe.” Which is better than usual, but Darcy’s not about to tell her that. “More than Matt, which is why he’s being dumb about the money. He’d be more worried, usually.”

“I don’t get why they’re being so okay with it. Just—God.” Karen runs her hands over her face, and hooks her hair up into a ponytail, tying it off. “It’s not something that we can _fix_. It’s not like—we can’t mess with a computer and get it to work again, it’s not like banging the router. If we go bankrupt, that’s it. That’s—that’s a black mark on our records and the end of the firm, of—of all of it, and that’s not something to wave off with an _it’ll work out fine_. It really isn’t.”

“You want me to talk to them again?”

“I don’t want to make a thing of it, just—” Karen huffs. “I’m worried, that’s all. About a lot of things, but—but this is pretty high on the list.”

As it should be. There’s something gnawing away at her duodenum right now, and it feels like a rat. “Karen,” she says, and Karen shuts her eyes in the way that she always does when she knows Darcy’s not going to take any more bullshit. “What is it?”

“I can’t be worried about debt and rotting bananas?”

“I’m pretty sure Foggy’s gonna eat the bananas before they start to rot, just, you know, for future reference. Or Matt. They’re organic, means he thinks they’re fair game.” She props her bag up on her lap. “Seriously. What’s wrong?”

Karen pulls a handful of hair over her shoulder, and starts to twist it, absently. “It’s—I don’t know. I just had a call from Ben this morning, before you guys came into work.”

Darcy stills. “He’s okay?”

“Jesus, can you not go to like defcon-five when I say things? Yes, he’s fine.” Karen waves that off. “Doris is fine too, it’s not the problem, he just—he was asking me if I’d heard anything about stuff going down in the Kitchen, and I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.”

“What kind of stuff?”

Karen tracks a clerk of court with her eyes. Once he’s out of earshot, she says, “Gang stuff. Suit stuff.”

Darcy bites her lip. “I mean, I haven’t heard anything. But that doesn’t mean all that much. Most of the gangs have been really quiet since everything that happened with Fisk. Trying to stay out of sight, I think. Which you would, if—you know.”

 _If someone’s coming through to beat the shit out of you,_ she thinks. She doesn’t have to say it.

“Yeah, well.” Karen shrugs. “Just—I dunno. You ever heard of the Dogs of Hell?”

Darcy leans back into the bench. Up on the ceiling, one of the lightbulbs is flickering. At least here, she thinks, there’s decent air conditioning. It’s plastering her wet shirt against her skin, and she’ll freeze if it keeps up like this, but it’s better than the outside world. “Yeah. Um—motorcycle gang, runs out of the Kitchen most nights. I can hear them sometimes from the apartment, if I’m up late. Hard to keep track of them, they trade in and out with other biker gangs in different areas of the city.”

Not to mention the fact that you can’t exactly chase a bike down on foot, but that’s not something she’s telling Karen. Karen nods. “Ben says something happened with them. He wouldn’t tell me what, but—but it was bad. Like—not Russians bad, but bad. Wanted to know if I’d heard anything, that’s all.”

Darcy tips her head. “What’d you tell him?”

“Jesus, you look like Matt when you do that.” Karen rubs her eyes. “I didn’t have anything _to_ tell him. I said I’d ask around.”

“I can look, if you want.”

“In this weather?”

She shrugs. “Weather doesn’t do much to stop stupid people. They still dump their shit all over the street and leave it for the rest of us to clean up.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“She tends to be,” says a voice, and they look up. Jen’s watching them from a few feet away, amused. She’s been getting sharper suits, lately, Jen—she looks like she’s just stepped out of a legal magazine, the top two buttons of her white shirt undone and her suit jacket draped over her arm. All curves and leg. At the other end of the hallway, Truesmith (who’s a good six inches shorter than Jen is out of heels) gives them a dark look, and passes Angie without a word. “I wonder sometimes if you’re ever g-going to leave the elementary school stage of _that’s vile, I want to poke it_.”

“Aw, Jenny.” Darcy bounces up off the bench, and hooks their arms together. “That’d be counter to my personality entirely, you know that.”

“Says the fully functional adult.” Jen’s eyebrows lift up into her hair, but she’s smiling, so, whatever. “I thought we didn’t have lunch until tomorrow.”

“You said Friday. This is Friday. How did the case go?”

“Fine.” Jen frowns. “It isn’t Thursday?”

“Yeah, we’re going to lunch,” Darcy says, and toasts Angie with her cup of coffee “I’ll give her back in an hour, Angie.”

“Give her back in three, she hasn’t left the offices in two days.”

That explains why Jen’s actually wearing perfume, for once. It hides the fact that she hasn’t showered. Jen makes a face at Angie. “You’re not any b-better than I am.”

“Go away, toucan,” says Angie, and that’s the end of the conversation. Darcy presses Jen’s elbow close into her side (which is difficult, considering Jen is not only very tall but wearing four-inch heels) and peers up at her.

“So. Carvel’s?”

There are loads of twenty-four hour cafes all around the courthouse. They’re taking advantage, Darcy thinks, of the fact that a lot of people work very long hours and generally need a great deal of coffee that doesn’t come out of a shitty, decade-old espresso machine. Carvel’s is one of the smaller ones, tucked in between a laundromat and a Starbucks, but it’s been here for twenty years, and the owner, a woman named Millicent, has had a soft spot for Jen ever since the first six months Jen had been taken on at the district attorney’s office and they’d discovered they shared elocutional difficulties. Millicent’s stutter is much worse than Jen’s is, now, but they still bonded, and so Jen gets free coffee when she comes in, and Darcy, as Jen’s proto-sister (cousin, technically, but—y’know) at least gets a buck knocked off her lattes. Jen sinks into the cushions of the back row with the expression that means she hasn’t actually sat down in a while, and she’s forgotten what it feels like. “You’re plotting,” she says, eyeing Darcy. “You have the p-plotting face on.”

“I do not have a plotting face.”

“Do I have to pull in an expert witness?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Jen.”

Jen’s lips quirk. “I’ll be as ridiculous as you are, D-Darcy.”

Karen, on the inside of the booth and knocking into Darcy, takes a sip of her coffee rather than participate in the conversation. _Dirty pool, Page._

“You look like you haven’t slept in a week, Jen,” Darcy says. The air conditioner’s running in here, too, but it’s not quite so powerful. There’s damp on the back of her neck. “Angie wasn’t lying when she said you haven’t left the courthouse in two days, was she?”

“Technically, I was thrown out of the courthouse both nights.” Jen catches Millicent’s eye. It’s only after they order that she adds, “Though they don’t mind me working at 100 Centre. I have a d-deal with Cosima, the lady who cleans, she doesn’t tell.”

“Have you showered?”

“I brought a toothbrush to the office.”

Darcy groans. “ _Jen._ ”

“Don’t be hypocritical, dear,” says Jen, and sips at her coffee. “You’ve done the same thing, I know you have. Even before you moved in with Matt, there were nights you wouldn’t c-come back at all.”

“Yeah, but—”

Karen steps on her foot. Darcy keens, and shuts up.

It’s only after the food (reubens and pie, for Jen, who apparently has been craving it all day) has arrived and Jen’s finished half of Darcy’s sandwich as well as her own that she sighs, and says, “It’s c-complicated. There’s been a lot of chatter at the office, lately. We’ve been trying to close a lot of cases, clear the load a little before something big hits. When there’s a heat wave people always g-go a little crazy in the city.”

“People are always crazy in the city,” Karen says. “I mean, we’re kind of ground zero for the crazy.” She pauses, and then says, “That wasn’t meant to be a 9/11 joke, I swear.”

“D-Didn’t take it as one.” Jen swipes her finger through the whipped cream on the top of her peach pie. “It’s to be expected. Still, lots of felonies coming through. Lots of ‘bangers trying to take the place of Wilson Fisk and his men, l-lots of drug trafficking charges. Prostitution, human trafficking, assaults, possession. N-not to mention all the vigilantes running around this town nowadays. Suspicious deaths, mutant powers. There aren’t laws to deal with mind control, y’know. It was d-damn hard to get Reyes to back down on charging your detective, Darcy, even with Hogarth in her corner.”

“Yeah, well, Jess didn’t do anything.”

“Which _I_ know,” Jen says, “but Reyes would like nothing b-better than to get her hands on any of the crazy suits running around throwing bad guys in the hospital. Spider-Man, he’s high on her list, but that’s because she reads the _Bugle._ The Avengers, upstate. She’s still in a fight with Tony Stark’s law team about all the damage his d-damn suit did to Grand Central Station, all the people who died when the space cow landed. Not to mention that we have Bonnie and C-Clyde in our own backyard.”

“The allegory’s not perfect,” Darcy says, carefully. “Daredevil and Lilith don’t steal anything. Or shoot cops, so far as I can tell.”

Jen finishes her coffee. Like a wraith, Millicent appears, and refills all three mugs. “Doesn’t change the fact that Reyes wants them going down. She has files on her desk for each of them. Aggravated assault, trespassing, ad nauseam. Not to m-mention everything else going on with the vigilante justice, all the laws they’ve broken. Get her on the topic, she d-doesn’t shut up for _hours_.”

That’s…not exactly the way Darcy wanted to come to the attention of Cruella de Ville, District Attorney. _If she doesn't scare you, no evil thing will._ “Huh.”

“Regardless of what Daredevil and Lilith have been d-doing lately, it’s all moot. I’m just busy, that’s all.” Jen’s eyebrows snap together. “So if this is an intervention, then—”

“It’s about as far from an intervention as you can get, actually.” Darcy curls her hands around her coffee mug. Probably drinking hot coffee is a bad idea, considering the weather, but she needs it. Like breathing. Also some aspirin, but that’s not happening until she gets back to the office. “I was wondering if, you know, anything had come across your desk that you think would fit with us.”

Jen goes quiet. She purses her lips, and peers at Darcy over the tops of her glasses, and Darcy feels about fifteen. She doesn’t actually ask. “Not mine, no,” she says, slowly, and then looks at the windows again. “I can look around, if you want. Anything wrong?”

“Not exactly.” Darcy shrugs. “Just sick of getting paid in fruit, even if it means I don’t actually have to buy it anymore.”

“You’re taking payment in _fruit_?”

“Hey, rooftop garden produce actually is the shit, Jenny.” She sobers up at the look on Jen’s face. “I haven’t been. Foggy and Matt are being…I don’t know. They’re kind of driving us crazy, actually, but it’s…it’s difficult when your clients are mostly immigrants or unemployed or, you know, both.” Mr. Maxwell can at least pay them a little for getting the assault charges dropped, which, judging by the look on Karen’s face when he’d mentioned it, is like putting a piece of scotch tape over a hole in the Hoover Dam. But at least it’s something. “Arguably we should be sending these people to legal aid agencies, but you know the statistics there, and just…they trust us. We can’t turn them away.”

Jen takes her glasses off, and starts wiping them clean on the hem of her button-down. “Fine. But if you do need help, you’ll ask, won’t you?”

“If I do,” Darcy says, carefully, “then I will. But right now, I’m not asking for help, Jen. All I want to know is if you’ve heard anything.”

Jen looks like she wants to put her face in her hands, which, in Jen-speak, is more _I’m thinking_ than _oh my god, why is this my life._ She takes her glasses off. “Actually,” she says, “I think I do remember something that you might be interested in. Don’t know the name or the current counsel, but Angie was c-complaining about some case she heard about. Racial discrimination suit down at civil.”

“Why’d Angie care?” says Karen.

Jen shrugs. “Didn’t ask.”

Darcy frowns. “Racial discrimination suits are a bitch and a half, Jen. They’re so hard to prove, especially if we’re talking like…employment or something. You don’t have the context, do you?”

“That’s b-basically all I know. Woman with a racial discrimination suit down at civil that Angie heard about.” Jen shrugs. “From the sound of it, though, she needs help. And according to Angie, she just fired her counsel, so she can probably pay for it if that’s really what you need. If you’re going ambulance-chasing again, then it might be worth a shot.”

“It’s not ambulance-chasing if there aren’t any ambulances, Jen.” She bites her thumbnail. “I’ll talk to Angie when we walk you back to the courthouse. But you’re going home, first. You need to shower, seriously.”

“Is that a crack about how I smell?” Jen stops, and blanches. “Wait, d-do I smell?”

“No, you just…look like you’ve worn the same thing for two days, and need to shower. It’ll help reset your brain.” Darcy prods at Jen’s ankle under the table. “Eat your sandwich, Jen.”

“I don’t need to be mothered,” says Jen, smiling a little. “Especially not by you.”

“Har-har,” she says. When she knocks her knee into Karen’s, Karen knocks her back, and applies herself to her pancakes with the air of a job well done. It’s not a paying case in the bag, she thinks, but it’s progress.

When she ducks into the bathroom to check how the cover-up is holding, there’s crusted blood in the hollow behind her earlobe.

.

.

.

Boston doesn’t agree with her. It’s something she’s thought for months, really. Boston doesn’t particularly agree with her. The air doesn’t smell quite right; the cars don’t have the same cadence. The license plates are wrong. She sits in a garden and looks up at the night sky and she can see stars, and that’s deeply, intrinsically odd. Vanessa pulls her feet up under her, shifting the computer around on her lap, and makes a face when someone on the main street blares a car horn.

Wilson’s property in Boston had been filed under a false name, a subsidiary of a conglomerate of a ghost company of a secret affiliate, and so even with all the digging that the FBI has been doing through their resources in the past year, this place—the Beacon Hill house, is what she calls it; the only property Wilson still has in Boston, the only thing that hadn’t been liquidated—has been left untouched. She can’t exactly leave it, not without half the police in New England going on a manhunt, but it’s a fairly nice prison, all things told. At least, she thinks, she can have Indian delivered.

“Miss Vanessa.”

It’s Christian. He’s shaved his head, recently, and so his skull gleams in the sunlight like polished ebony, his eyes careful and steady, and fixed on her face. Vanessa turns so she can look at him, closing the computer partway. “What is it?”

“A call for you.”

“Who from?” She wrinkles her nose. “It’s not that obsequious lawyer again, is it?”

“No, Miss Vanessa.” He creeps closer, and holds out one hand. The screen of the phone is lit up with the words _Unknown Number_. “I believe it’s Madame Gao.”

Vanessa blinks. She takes the phone. She waits, though, one fingertip pressed over the receiver, until Christian has slunk away back into the house. When she settles it against her ear, her earrings click together. “Hello?”

“It was extraordinarily difficult to get in touch with you, you realize,” says Iris, and slowly but surely, Vanessa relaxes. Of course, it could still be a trap—she hasn’t spoken to Madame Gao in six months, not since she’d actively begun her hunt, and Madame Gao had gone back to rebuilding her empire—but she’s more inclined to relax than not. Constant stress isn’t particularly good for her, especially now. “I had to ask some of your men very forcefully.”

“Do I have to get new ones?”

“Not if they continue to be polite from now on.”

Vanessa draws her fingers along the petal of a flower by the base of her chair. “I think that can be arranged easily enough. Why are you calling?”

“A friend of yours visited me today to extend her greetings,” says Iris. “I thought it impolitic not to return the favor.”

“I see.” Vanessa snips the head of the flower off with her thumbnail. “Everything’s worked out, then?”

“So far as I could tell.” Iris hums. “It would not be wise for her to return here. I have already informed her of the circumstances.”

“She merely wished to say hello on my behalf, I think.” She picks a petal free. “It’s hard for me to move as I’d like, nowadays.”

“I thought I’d heard a rumor you were somewhere in the Middle East,” says Iris. She sounds amused. “Whatever smokescreen campaign you’ve been running, it’s quite successful.”

Vanessa folds the hem of her scarf over her collarbone. “That’s good to hear. It’s still not quite good enough for me to be able to wander how I please, but we’ve managed considering the time limits.”

“Ah,” says Iris. “Then you have not seen him, have you?”

Vanessa looks up at the clouds, at the way they’re rolling over the sky. There’s no particular sting to it, the words. Of course she hasn’t seen him; she’s wanted in New York State, she can’t cross the border, and even if she somehow smuggled herself in there would be no way to get into the prison without being thrown there herself. So no, it doesn’t hurt, not exactly. The ache’s more constant than anything. It doesn’t rise and fall; it swallows her up and spits her back out. If not for the work, there are some days she wouldn’t even be able to get out of bed. “No,” she says, after a moment. “I haven’t.”

“More’s the pity,” Iris says. “He seems to be doing well for himself. I’d very much like to know how he’s getting his information.”

That, at least, she knows. She has people in the prison system the same way she has people everywhere else. Some are Wilson’s old contacts. Most of them are her own.

“Did you only call today to say hello?” She plucks another petal off the flower, and lets it drop into the grass. “I do have other things to get done.”

“I’m aware.” There’s a clattering on the other end, a burst of Chinese. “I wished to inquire into your progress on the matter of Lilith and the Devil.”

“Every man I’ve sent to observe the law firm has wound up with broken bones,” says Vanessa. It’s more sour than she’d like. “The pair of them seem to have an exceptional sense as to when their legal pets are being watched. Why do you ask?”

“No reason in particular,” says Iris. It’s an out-and-out lie, but Vanessa doesn’t call her on it. “I’d warn your girl that the city is going to be busy in the next few months. She ought to keep her head down, if she wants to keep it at all.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“What did I bother sending you Davos for, if you can’t even answer a simple question like that?” says Iris, and she hangs up. Vanessa stares at the screen of the phone, watching it blink into sleep mode. Then she sets it aside, and brushes the petals off of her lap.

“Christian.”

He must have been waiting just inside the French doors. Christian peers out, hands folded behind his back. “Yes, Miss Vanessa?”

“Is there anything going on in New York at the moment that I haven’t been informed of?”

Christian dips his head. “I’ll look into it.”

“I appreciate it, Christian, thank you.” When she passes him, she rests her fingers to his shoulder, just long enough that she can see his eyes flicker. “Check that wretched blog, if you must. Say what you will about the reporter, he at least knows how to get things out in a timely manner.”

“Yes, Miss Vanessa.”

Vanessa smiles, and then locks herself in the office. She needs privacy, she thinks, if she’s going to start making calls.

.

.

.

Typically on Friday evenings they invade Fogwell’s to practice. Not just Darcy and Matt—though they’re here far more often than anyone else, now, enough that Bernie gets a bit confused when they _don’t_ show up after closing—but Karen, and Kate, and occasionally even Foggy, though he’s always been a hard sell when it comes to learning how to physically defend himself. “I thought the point of having vigilante best friends was to not _need_ to know this stuff,” he’d said three months into it, staring at the mats with Karen pinning him to the floor with her knee and one long-nailed hand. “I thought, you know, that you’d guys come running to my rescue or whatever.”

“I mean, we would,” Darcy had told him, balanced on top of one of the ring posts, “but at the same time it’s kind of difficult. Considering all the trouble you like to get into, Foggy, y’know.”

“You’re awful and I hate you.”

It makes him uncomfortable, she thinks. Seeing it, rather than just hearing about it. Knowing that the things that Matt’s teaching them, that Darcy sometimes can help coach them through, those are the same things that are putting men in the hospital every night. Foggy doesn’t like it, and so he fades in and out, enough to learn how to get someone off him if he gets grabbed from behind, but not much beyond. Karen comes more often, sensibly dressed and waiting for instruction, and Darcy has her own theories about that one, too. Kate’s the one who shows up most often, dependable as clockwork, popping her gum and snarking her way through getting her ass kicked. (Less and less often, nowadays, especially considering she has other teachers, too. But it’s still intense.) 

Today, though, Kate’s off in Albany with Clint for some reason, wandering around or doing some odd training thing or Hawkeye bird-bonding or cliff-diving or whatever it is they do during those random times they disappear for no good reason. Karen had had another call from Ben on the way back to the office, and darted off into the ether. And Foggy, well. He’d had a decent excuse. (“Lewis, it’s a hundred and three in the shade. If you think I’m pulling this shit tonight, you’re crazy.”)

So when Matt wanders in at about six-forty, in sweatpants and carrying a duffel bag, Darcy’s already messing around with one of the bags. He doesn’t say a word, just comes to steady it from the other side. It takes her two minutes of smacking the bag as hard as she can before she manages to say, “Ben called Karen this morning. Says that the Dogs of Hell are in a tizzy about something, but he couldn’t say what.”

Matt takes his glasses off. When she steps away from the bag to grab her water bottle, he leaves them on the nearest bench. “Couldn’t or wouldn’t?”

“Either-or. There’s nothing on the blog yet, so it probably means he’s still confirming. Kare’s meeting up with him before we all head to Josie’s, so hopefully there’ll be more information in a few hours.” Darcy pushes her hair out of her eyes. “She’s stressing. Worried that you and Foggy aren’t taking the whole _we’re broke_ thing seriously.”

Matt laughs. “Well, I mean, there are only so many ways to take the news. I picked something that didn’t involve breaking things.”

“Look, I know you have your volcano thing of keeping things inside until they explode all over and like…singe the rest of us, but please, can we have some kind of meeting on Monday about strategies?” Darcy heaves a breath. “I’ve done the scraping from day to day thing, Matt. So have you, so has Foggy, so has Karen. It’s—I’d really rather not go back to that if I can help it.”

“We can’t exactly take money from people who don’t have it, Darcy.” He braces the bag again, and waits for her to go back to punching things. “And we can’t turn them away.”

“I _know_ that.” She hits the bag hard enough that her elbow whines, and dances back. “I know that, we can’t—we can’t turn them away. I know we can’t, that’s not what we’re here for. It’s not—”

Darcy stops. She shuts her eyes. _In and out, Lewis._ Four hours of sleep, and that’s an hour and a half more than she normally gets. She’s honestly not sure Matt slept at all, judging by how he keeps blinking like a confused seal when he thinks no one’s paying attention. Four hours of sleep, and their business is failing, and they have to keep it from Kate otherwise she’ll swoop in and think she fixes it the way rich people always think they fix things, and it’s too fucking hot for any of this. “We just need to prioritize,” she says, finally. “And maybe stop accepting pie.”

“Foggy will be sad.”

“Foggy can buy his own pie with the money we’ll get from actual paying clients, and then maybe we can go back to accepting pie. Alongside money, obviously. A better business model equals more pie and possibly even more strawberry rhubarb, I don’t know.”

He hums. Matt cocks his head at her, and then hooks two fingers into the waistband of her pants, tugging her around to clock into him. Darcy whines. “It’s too hot for that.”

“We’ll make it work,” Matt says. He leaves his hand braced over the small of her back. “We have to. We’ll figure it out.”

“We have to consider shifting into a legal aid organization, if this is how we’re going to keep doing things.” Darcy touches her fingertips to his shoulder. “Seriously, Matt. Being defense attorneys, that’s a good job, that’s what we started out with, but—but clearly we’re doing way more work as legal aids than anything else at this point. If we’re going to keep working the way we are, then the transition is something we need to look at seriously. The grants would help.”

“We’d need to completely restructure the firm if we make the shift.”

“Yeah, but we’d also be able to afford to pay the electricity bill, and thus keep the doors open and keep on helping where we can. It’s a balance. We just haven’t figured it out yet.”

“Mm.”

Darcy rests her palms to the bag, and sways around to knock into him. It’s too damn hot in Fogwell’s, and running into him is like walking into a heating coil, but she does it anyway. Matt shifts, and pushes back. “You’re not usually this quiet after a good night. You okay?”

“It’s nothing, I’m fine.” Matt turns his face to the ring for a moment, considering. “Just thinking about Mrs. Almeida.”

“About Mrs. Almeida or about her husband and the butcher knife?”

“Not her husband so much. Just—I don’t know.”

Darcy doesn’t even have to say anything anymore. Almost seven months of _I don’t know_ and _bullshit, Matt, you totally do_ have left their mark on both of them. She just cocks an eyebrow at him, and waits.

“If we stop,” he says, “if—if we take a night off, if we stop, then people get hurt. Sometimes I just—I wonder what we miss, when we’re not out there. When we’re not listening, or—or trying to get in the way. I wonder what happens.”

Darcy curls her fingers into the fabric of his shirt. She can’t exactly say it’s not something that’s kept her awake at night, what happens when they’re not outside, when they’re not paying attention, when they’re not trying. For the first month or so after Fisk she hadn’t been able to _stop_ thinking about it, really, the things that she hadn’t been able to stop. Ephemeral images of dead women, dead men. Blood and pain. Gunshots and drugs and cruelty. She’s come to a balance with it, now, wrangled it under control as best she can, but it still lingers. _If I know something has to be happening out there, and I can stop it but I don’t, what does that make me, anyway?_

“We can’t fix everything,” she says, when Matt tips his head towards hers in a silent question. “It’d be the same if we were just working at the firm, or at the DA, or at a legal aid place or a homeless shelter or any of it. We can’t fix everything. The world doesn’t work like that.”

“I know.”

“You know.” She tugs on his shirt again. “But you still feel guilty.”

Matt doesn’t say anything. Still, when Darcy pulls on his shirt one more time, he bends into her, into a kiss as light as gossamer. Darcy rests her scarred hand over his heart as she says, “You can’t take on the whole world, Matt. You can’t save everyone and you can’t stop everything. If you try, then all you’re gonna do is break yourself.”

“I don’t want to take on the whole world.” It’s too hot to lean into him, too goddamn hot to do more than balance on her toes and leave her palm to his chest to keep her balance, but when Matt settles another kiss to the corner of her mouth, she hums into it. “Just the parts that piss me off.”

“That I can get behind.” She touches her lips to his jaw, and then says, “So can we talk about the irony of that guy last night letting you chase him into a church? Because that was fucking hilarious. Though I’m pretty sure I still have little shards of the Virgin Mary in my hair.”

“Shut up,” Matt says. The corners of his mouth lift. “You were chasing him too.”

“I was, but like…I’m not the Catholic, here.”

“Not saying it wasn’t ironic, just that you’re part of the irony.” He prods at her hips. “It’s too hot for you to lean on me.”

“Arguably, that means it’s too hot to spar.”

“Not for more than twenty minutes, no,” he says, and she groans as she heaves her way up into the ring.

It’s closer to nine than it is to eight when they finally make their way over to Josie’s, but it’s still cracking a hundred even long after the sun has set. It’s really, really bad for crime rates, she thinks, staring down an alley at a cat disappearing under a dumpster. People are dumb during heat waves generally, but people who aren’t used to the heat get angry, and when people get angry they get stupid, and when people get stupid they pull dumb shit like trying to whack their neighbor with a baseball bat or try to steal a whole Trump Tower’s worth of diamonds or try to beat their boyfriend’s head in with a hammer. (All of these things have happened in the past five days, and she’s really tired of it. _Really_ tired of it. Seriously, the most tired.) If there’s any city on the planet that’s not made for a heatwave, it’s New York.

Josie’s is crammed with people looking for cold beer, which means the A/C has conked out. Walking in is like walking into a tub full of chicken noodle soup. Karen and Foggy are already at the pool table, bickering about something to do with the 8-ball. No Ben in sight. Which, really, she kind of expected; Ben has a wife to keep an eye on and a brownstone with actual air conditioning; why the fuck would he brave their divey bar instead of sending Karen with news? “I have gorgeous friends,” Darcy says, and Foggy shuts up in an attempt not to laugh. “Look at the pair of you, you are gorgeous humans. Even covered in sweat and lit up with red lighting. I feel like I should be beating suitors off with a stick right now. Why am I not beating people off with a stick?”

“After the disaster that was my date last night, please do not. I think explicit violence would send the wrong message.” Foggy gestures at the end of the table, where two bottles of beer have been left untouched. “Kate’s not crashing this shindig?”

“Kate’s still up near Albany last I heard. She should be back tomorrow, though, if nothing goes wrong or if they don’t get lost driving back into the city.” Darcy clicks her bottle to Karen’s, and sips at the beer. “Never gets any better, no matter how hard it tries. Anyway, she’ll be back tomorrow night at the latest. Why, you miss her?”

“Just wondering when the peace and quiet of the office is gonna shatter is all.” Foggy misses his shot, and swears. “Is anyone else feeling shots tonight? I’m feeling shots.”

“Oh, God,” says Matt, laughing. “Not—not exactly, no.”

“You have no sense of _adventure_ , Murdock.”

“Is there a bet on this game?” Darcy steals Foggy’s cue. “Does it involve emptying the paper shredder?”

“No, but that’s a good bet, we should make that the endgame.” Foggy flares his fingers. “Whoever wins gets to pick who empties the paper shredder for a week and a half.”

“Don’t add a bet on in the middle of the game, Foggy, that’s cheating.” Karen knocks the three into the pocket, and shifts around to the other side of the table. On top of the TV, Rosa the cockatoo makes an unhappy noise. She’s molting, and there are feathers all over the floor of the bar. “We can do that next game, though.”

“So what was the bet for this game?”

“Piece of the strawberry rhubarb,” Karen says, grinning, and knocks the six in, too. “Score.”

“God _damn_ you, Page—”

“Darcy.”

It’s not Matt, not exactly. Well, it’s Matt, but it’s softer, quieter. The hair on the back of her neck stands on end. Darcy knocks her shoulder into his chest, close enough that he can whisper without it looking strange. “What?”

“Don’t look around.” He dips down, and warmth tickles against her ear. Sweat is dribbling down her spine. “Someone at the bar is watching us.”

“We’re usually watched,” she says. “We are a group of very pretty people, plus you. Usually means we attract attention in public spaces.”

Matt doesn’t laugh. “Don’t usually get stared at by men with guns, though.”

“Hm.” She taps her fingernail against the glass of her beer. “Which one?”

“Coat, about halfway down the bar.”

She doesn’t turn, not exactly. She hooks her hair behind her ears, and shifts her weight so she can see the bar as well as she can see the pool table, as well as she can watch Karen and Foggy snipe away at each other over the balls. He’s not wrong, she thinks. The guy’s definitely watching them. There’s a sheen of sweat on his upper lip that’s probably from the crowd, from the heat and the humidity, but he’s twitching. He keeps bouncing his leg against the barstool.

“I’m gonna talk to him,” Matt says, and Darcy catches his arm.

“Blind guy walking up to a counter to talk to a guy packing a gun and a twitchy finger? Like that works.”

“If he’s here to start something—”

“He’s not gonna start something.”  

“Darcy—”

“Can you think of any way a blind man noticing someone packing a gun from across the room isn’t suspicious? Because I can’t.” She lifts her chin. “I’ll go. I need to grab the shots anyway.”

Matt presses his fingers hard into the bone of her hip, and then lets go. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

“Please. You’re talking to me.” She bounces up onto her toes, kisses his cheek. “Since when do I do anything stupid?”

“Don’t make me answer that.”

“Sometimes I wonder why I date you,” she says, and turns to Foggy. “You still up for shots?”

“Twist my arm, Lewis,” Foggy says without looking at her. On the other side of the table, Karen’s eyes dart to Matt, and then back to Darcy. “Tequila for me.”

“I thought you were done with tequila,” Matt says.

“What can I say, the eel has a siren song I cannot deny.”

“Gross,” says Darcy. “Karen? Vodka?”

“If she still has it.” Karen looks at Matt again, and then goes back to ripping Foggy apart. “If not, just—whatever looks the least like it’s gonna eat through my insides like acid.”

“So not Tammy Swanson’s farm booze, understood.”

Josie has feathers in her hair when Darcy bounces up to the counter, but for once she actually looks like she’s in a good mood. The heat, Darcy thinks. For some reason, Josie thrives in disgusting temperatures like this. It might be because she’s from Louisiana, Darcy isn’t entirely sure. That, or she’s, you know, inhuman. “Tonight is a shots night, Jos,” Darcy says, and plonks herself on the barstool right next to Signore Twitch. “You still have the things?”

“’slong as you still have your tab.”

“You’re gorgeous.”

Josie snorts, and stalks off. It’s possibly the nicest she’s been to Darcy in the years since they started coming her, and it’s weird. Darcy peels her hair up off the back of her neck, ties it off. Next to her, Twitchy Dude glances at the _ABSOLUTELY NO TABS_ sign behind the bar, and then says, “What’d you do to wrangle that one?”

“Helped with some fire code violations like three years ago. Plus, I’m charming.” She swivels around on her stool, propping her elbow on the counter. “You’re new.”

Twitchy Guy looks at her, and then back to the pool table. He glances at the door. “Yeah, well. Guy can drink where he wants, can’t he?”

“Not if he’s packing whatever you’re packing, he can’t.” She smiles, and Twitchy Guy starts actually _vibrating_. It’s kind of fascinating to watch. “Take a chill pill. Not saying that to pick a fight. You’re in a heavy coat in a hot bar during one of the worst heat waves New York’s had in twenty years, you think anyone with eyes and half a brain can’t tell you’re carrying?”

Twitchy Guy’s eyes dart to her face, and stick there. “’n who are you?”

“Darcy.” She wipes her hand on her skirt, and offers it to him. It takes him a full ten seconds to actually take it, and when he does, his fingers are shaking. There’s a smear of something dark on the inside of his wrist. “You realize like half the people in here have guns, right? Kinda stupid, you know, to yank out whatever you have and whack it on the table like you wanna compare lengths.”

“Not what I’m here for.” Twitchy Guy shoves his hand back into his pocket. “Attention’s the last thing I want.”

“Funny way of not attracting attention, this.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she can see Matt pinch the bridge of his nose in the biggest _Lord give me strength_ she’s seen to date.

“’ve heard about you guys,” says Twitchy Guy, and lifts his chin towards the pool table. “Nelson, Murdock, and Lewis. That the blind one, there?”

“Yes,” says Darcy, slowly. “What’s this about?”

He searches her face. “If you’re who they say you are, then I need your help.”

“And who do they say we are?”

“Nelson, Murdock, and Lewis,” he says again. “The nice one, the blind one, and the one that’ll rip your throat out with her teeth.”

“I’m not that mean,” Darcy says. “I mean, I don’t think I am.”

Twitchy Guy shrugs. “’s what they call you. I’m not the one who came up with it.”

“Well, whoever did is gonna get a boot up his ass.” When Josie reappears with four shot glasses, Darcy takes two. “You want help?” she says. “Help me get these glasses over there. And do me a favor? Keep your gun tucked in your pants.”

.

.

.

His name, he tells them, is Grotto. He kind of forgets to mention that he’s dying.

Okay, no, he’s not dying. That’s an exaggeration. He’s lost a lot of blood, though (and she really wants to ask Matt what the hell is going on, because usually he’d, you know, _notice_ that the guy that’s asking for witness protection is _actually covered in blood right now_ ) and so when he falls out of his chair onto the floor it’s not all that surprising that he’s completely out of it. Like, actually unconscious, not just half-woozy and swooning like a Catholic schoolgirl with a hand up her skirt. _The Dogs of Hell_ Darcy thinks, as Karen folds up a towel that Josie produces from behind the bar and presses it down over the wound. _The Dogs of Hell and the Kitchen Irish._ Glass cuts and more than a dozen Irish mobsters gunned down in one of their own goddamn pubs. The world’s getting wrenched out from under her feet, and she’s not sure she can stop it.

“Do I really look like I’m gonna rip someone’s throat out with my teeth?” she asks Karen, as the EMTs load Grotto up into the ambulance. Behind them, Matt and Foggy are muttering about something, probably arguing. Darcy’s taking advantage of the breeze. “Seriously.”

“Occasionally I get worried you’re going to come over the top of the conference room table at someone, yes.” Karen hooks her hair behind her ear. Darcy’s met exactly none of these EMTs, which means that when Karen introduced herself as Mrs. Steve Schaeffer, all of them had bought it hook, line, and sinker. Which, holy shit, she sometimes forgets how good Karen is at acting. “Are you coming?”

“Have to stop at home, first.” She wraps her arms around Karen for a moment, hiding her face. In spite of the heat, Karen squeezes her back. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“You don’t have to come.”

“If what Grotto says happened is the truth, then I’m really not comfortable with you being the only thing standing between him and whoever shot up that pub, even if you do have the .380.”

“I don’t. Not on me, anyway.”

 _Great._ Darcy sinks back onto her heels. “Go. If Claire sees you there, then…I don’t know, avoid her. What’s my name?”

“Anita Schaeffer,” Karen says. “You’re my sister-in-law.”

“Am I older or younger?”

“Older sister.”

“Sweet, I get to be bitchy when he wakes up.” She kisses Karen’s cheek. “Go with Steve.”

Karen goes with Steve. She has to bellow her way into the back of the ambulance, but she goes with Steve, and Darcy waits until the ambulance is out of sight before turning around. Foggy’s stripped off his suit jacket, and rolled up his sleeves. There’s a smear of blood on his shirt. “Everything okay?”

“Club’s at 47th and 10th,” Foggy says. “That’s maybe three blocks from here, one block north. We were gonna walk it, see if we can figure anything out. Someone seriously had to pull this shit now? Seriously.”

“Some guys go up to Canada for the weekend. Others blow up Irish gangsters. You have to find a balance.” Darcy bounces in her shoes. They’re flats, and they’re tied, so it really wouldn’t be difficult to pull some alleyway racing on her way back to the apartment, but it’s also just…hot. And gross. “I’m gonna cab back to the apartment and then go to Metro-General. You want me to say hi to Claire?”

“I think you’ve talked to her more than any of us, the past three months, dunno how true it’ll ring.”

“She likes hearing it anyway.” Darcy cocks her head. “Matt?”

“I’m going with Foggy.”

“Call me if that changes.”

“Darcy,” he says, as she starts to turn away, and catches her hand, pulling her back. Foggy looks pointedly at the sign for Josie’s. “Be careful.”

“I’m always careful.”

“Because telling a guy with a gun to take a chill pill is careful,” Matt says, but he tips her chin up and kisses her anyway, light and fast. Darcy snorts at him.

“Hypocrisy, thy name is Matthew Murdock.” She yanks on his tie when he snickers. “Don’t piss the cops off too much.”

“He’s good at it,” Foggy says, still staring very hard at Josie’s. Darcy rolls her eyes, and steps away.

“That goes for you, too, chuckles. I don’t want to have to drag my ass down to holding to bail either of you out, so just…be nice. And if Brett’s there, don’t be mean to him. He suffers a lot, y’know.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Foggy says, but he deigns to let her buss his cheek. “Whatever, Lewis.”

She waves without looking back, and snags a cab.

Darcy’s long since worked out how exactly she can pull off wearing the Lilith uniform under her clothes. She has it a little easier than Matt, outfit-wise, just because as a woman she doesn’t get side-eyed for wearing long skirts, _especially_ when it’s hot out. Plus, the boots go up to the middle of her calf, which means anyone catching a flash of black around her ankles assumes it’s her shoes. She pulls a sweatshirt on over the top (she’s going to a hospital, and if she has to she can claim shock) and leaves her gloves and her mask in a cloth purse she scrounges out of the back of the closet. The rose-colored glasses she’d worn to infiltrate Metro-General the first time ( _oh, Nurse Lebowski, thank god you transferred to Our Lady of Sorrows_ ) are perched on her nose when she slips in through one of the side doors, and heads for the ICU. “Anita Schaeffer,” she tells the nurse at the desk, a new one, she thinks, one she hasn’t met before. “I’m, um—my brother was brought in about half an hour ago, my sister-in-law is here somewhere, I think—”

“ID?” says the nurse, but at the same time, someone clears their throat.

“It’s okay, Louisa,” says Claire, and tucks her folders under her arm. “I saw her earlier, she’s clear.”

Louisa the desk nurse looks from Claire to Darcy and back again before nodding, and pointing down the hall with her pen. “Room 415.”

“Thank you,” Darcy says. “This way?”

“I’ll take you,” says Claire, in a voice that Darcy recognizes. _Uh-oh._

Room 415 is around the corner from the nurse’s desk, which means as soon as they’ve passed out of sight, Claire seizes her by the elbow and drags her into an empty room. Or…not an empty room. A room with a sleeping patient. “Whoa, okay. Are we gonna wake him up?”

“He’s a vegetable. Anything he hears, he’s not ever gonna repeat.” Claire scowls. “Look. I really do not need a lot of drama tonight, okay, so whatever’s happening, can you tell me?”

“Hello to you too,” Darcy says, and blinks. “Are you okay? You look like you’re a walking pincushion.”

“I haven’t left the ER in days, I haven’t slept in thirty-six hours, and I really don’t have time to dance around it, so can you just—can you tell me for certain that nothing insane is going to happen tonight?”

“Insane things don’t always happen when I show up,” Darcy says. Claire scoffs.

“Please. They always happen when you show up. It’s like your face is a trouble-magnet.”

“That’s the second time tonight people have been snippy about how my face is shaped. I don’t appreciate it.”

Claire gives her a look with some very unimpressed eyebrows. “Sure. Is he showing up, too?”

“Probably not. Or if he is, he’s gonna warn me, so I can warn you.”

Claire crosses her arms over her chest. “I don’t need a warning. Just answer the question. Can you tell me for sure that shit isn’t going to go down tonight? Because this is quite literally the _last_ night that I need shit to go down on. The very last. The apocalypse could happen, and tonight would still be worse.”

“I can’t give you answers I don’t have, Claire.” Darcy shoves her rose-colored glasses up her nose. “I don’t know. I’m pretty sure things should be okay, but just—keep an eye out, all right? Just in case.”

“Because that’s not ominous.” Claire’s eyes dip down to Darcy’s boots. “Please don’t fight in my workplace. I like working here, most of the time. When they’re not punishing me for doing my job outside of regulations.”

“That thing with the kids?”

“That and your friend and her giant, indestructible boy toy.” She blows air out her nose. “So I’d really appreciate it if things can be kept as quiet as possible tonight. I don’t need the administration breathing down my neck any more than they already are.”

The door’s shut. Still, Darcy glances at the knob, just to make sure, before she reaches out and squeezes Claire’s elbow. “I’m sorry,” she says. “Most—most of that isn’t your fault. It’s ours. You shouldn’t be the one getting into trouble for it.”

Claire shuts her eyes, and breathes out, long and slow. “I don’t blame you, y’know. If you hadn’t called me in with that kid, he’d probably be dead. And I was the one who decided to lug the detective and her boyfriend out in my car. I’ve made my choices the whole way through. I just…don’t want to have to choose between helping you and doing my job, Darcy, not again.”

“I’ll remember.”

Claire rolls her eyes up to the ceiling, and threads her stethoscope through her fingers. “I need to get back down to the ER before anyone misses me,” she says. “I was just up here for some charts. Whoever Steve Schaeffer is, you’d better make sure that that’s who he stays. I don’t need cops crawling all over my hospital.”

“I’ll do my best.”

She scoffs. Still, Claire snags Darcy’s elbow and squeezes her back before stalking back off down the hall.

Grotto’s still completely passed out by the time Darcy gets into the hospital room. Karen’s perched in a chair with her head in her hand, watching him carefully. She glances over her shoulder when Darcy comes in, but all she says is, “So, Ben was right.”

“Well, something’s going on, anyway.” Darcy perches at the end of Grotto’s bed. “What’d the nurses say?”

“He needs PT and a few days of bedrest. Which he’s probably gonna fight, for a lot of reasons.” She looks at the door. “Steve’s always argued about things like this.”

“Believe me, I know.” Darcy offers her bag. “I brought you different clothes. If you want to change out of those.”

Karen smiles, thin, and takes it, setting the bag on the floor at her feet. “Thanks.”

“Coffee?”

“Please.”

“Happy Friday,” Darcy says, and Karen laughs.

“Yeah. Happy Friday.”

An hour passes. Then an hour and a half. She hears from Matt at the hour-thirty mark, clipped and careful. There’s wind whistling in the background. He’s probably chilling on a rooftop, again. “Proto-military group,” he says. “Or, at least, that’s how it looks so far. Nobody’s caught sight of them yet. Brett says they’ve been hitting some of the local gangs pretty hard. Dogs of Hell, like Ben said.”

“Proto-military?”

“Heavy duty weaponry.” He pauses. “I’ve talked to Turk already, he gave me some names.”

“I’ll stay on Steve.” She curls her hair around her finger. “What about Foggy, what’s he doing?” 

“Foggy’s gonna try to get some questions answered. Said he was going to talk with a guy he knows.”

Darcy stops, and blinks at the wall. “Since when does Foggy know a guy?”

“He grew up here same as me. You know people when that happens.”

“You didn’t even ask?”

“Darcy. It’s Foggy. He’ll be fine.”

“If you say so,” she says. The words feel like severed fingers in her mouth, scraping and heavy, bloody on her tongue. “What’d you get from Judas Priest?”

“I’m heading to the Meatpacking District, Mexican cartel’s picking up heavy firepower.”

“That’s…very unspecified. Which group are we talking about here?”

“Los Milagros, I think. Maybe the Serpiente boys, I’m not sure. Turk didn’t have a lot to say after I threw away his keys.”

Darcy twists her hair again. “River?”

“Mm.”

“You amuse me,” she says, and Matt laughs. Darcy turns away from Grotto’s bed. “All’s quiet on the western front. You want me to meet you there?”

“It’s Los Milagros. Even if they’re trying to build up their weapons base, they’re nothing we haven’t gone up against before.” He huffs. “Besides, I’m just gonna look.”

“Like you’ve ever said that and actually meant it.” She stares at the door. “Don’t be cocky, Matt.”

“When am I ever cocky?”

“You want me to give you a list?”

“I’m…not sure I can actually argue with that one. Do you have a list? Of every single time I’ve been cocky, really? That’s—that’s dedicated, I’ll give you that.”

“Don’t be a jackass.” Still, she’s smiling. “Just—be careful.”

For a second, all she can hear on the other end of the phone is the wind. Then, very quietly, Matt says, “I made you a promise. I’m not going anywhere. You don’t have to worry.”

Darcy folds the hem of her sweatshirt over her fingers. The scar on the back of her hand catches the light, oddly, flashing pale in her skin. “So you’re allowed to worry about me but I’m not allowed to worry about you?”

“Logical, isn’t it?”

“Not really, no.”

“I’m fine.” He hesitates. “I’m not the one sitting in a hospital waiting for a gang of shooters to come after the one guy they didn’t manage to gun down.”

“When you put it like that, it makes it sound like I’m doing something dangerous.”

“Darcy.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” She blows her hair out of her eyes. “I know.”

“I love you,” Matt says.

“You keep using that on me like you think it’s gonna make me worry less.”

“Doesn’t make it not true.”

And that’s a low blow. The nice kind, but still dirty pool. Darcy pinches her nose. “I love you. I’ll call if anything happens here.”

“Half an hour,” he says, and hangs up the phone. Darcy slips hers back into her pocket, and turns to find Karen watching her.

“All’s fine.” She drops down on the end of Grotto’s bed again. “He’s looking. You hear anything more from Ben?”

“He’s in with Doris, tonight. She had a bad night. He can’t exactly go looking around right now.” Karen presses her hand over her mouth, for a moment, watching Grotto breathe. His heart rate monitor’s been doing odd things the past half an hour or so, speeding up and slowing down, which Darcy is pretty sure means that he might be waking up. Still, no sign so far. “You don’t have to stay here, if you’re that worried about him.”

“If I’m here I’ll be worried about him, and if I’m there I’ll be worried about you and Steve. Besides, I told you, I’m not about to walk off right now, not considering the circumstances.” She pats at Grotto’s feet, awkwardly. “I just don’t like waiting for something to happen. It’s like sticking my head up over the edge of a trench and waiting for someone to plink me.”

“I mean, it’s not particularly enjoyable on this end, either.” Karen rolls her neck, and props her chin in one hand. “You sure that’s all it is?”

“Do I have anything else to be paranoid about?”

“Is it paranoid to worry?”

“Just—I don’t know. Things have been going well, lately. Since—” She waves at the wall, hoping Karen can translate _Fisk_ and _Nobu_ and _Vanessa_ without her having to say it. “Well, for almost a year. I don’t want to break the lucky streak.”

Karen draws her feet up into the chair, leaving her shoes on the floor. “You think something’s gonna break it?”

“I think there’s no point in tempting fate.”

“D—Anita, seriously. If you really want to go—”

“I’m staying here.” Darcy makes herself smile. Or partly makes herself. Half of it’s real, she thinks. “Not gonna leave my sister-in-law alone waiting for my noble idiot of a little brother to wake up.”

“Still—”

The EKG jumps again. At the same time, Grotto makes a little, pained sound under his breath, and shifts his hands across the bedspread. Karen’s out of her chair and pressing him back into the mattress before he can do more than twitch. “Steve,” she says, and then again, sharper: “Steve, I need you to calm down. Anita’s gonna get the nurses, okay?”

“Who the fuck is Anita?” says Grotto.

“Thanks, bro.” Darcy says, and goes out to find someone who doesn’t look too busy.

It’s only once she’s managed to snag Louisa and made the appropriate _thank God, thank God_ noises over the messy cut in Grotto’s side—it takes about half an hour, which, Jesus—that Darcy slips away. She texts Foggy on the way to the bathroom ( _please let me know when you get home_ ) and then ducks into the first empty stall. The lock slides home with a satisfying _thunk_. Darcy doesn’t breathe, for a moment. She leans against the door, forehead against the cool metal, and she listens to her heartbeat, thundering in her ears. _In and out,_ she says again, and draws in air through her nose. _In and out._

It’s probably the firm, she thinks. The money and the lack of paying clients and the fucking bananas are all meshing together, making her worry when she doesn’t need to. It’s been really good, the past six months, _really_ good. Even with the unexpected, nothing’s ended badly. Things have been changing, things have been happening. Most of the big gangs in the kitchen have slunk into their holes to lick their wounds after Fisk, and taking care of the ones who creep out—that’s been easy. Matt’s right, she thinks. Los Milagros is nothing they haven’t dealt with before. He can handle them on his own, same way she could. She’s handled them on her own. It’s not the first time they’ve worked separate angles of the same thing. There’s no reason for her to be this worried, this time. _Everything’s fine,_ she thinks. When she says it aloud, it echoes wrong. “Everything’s fine.” There’s no one else in the bathroom, and it still feels like she’s telling a lie.

 _Home,_ Foggy says. _And I’m fine._ Darcy turns her phone on silent, and puts it back into her pocket.

Proto-military, Matt said. And everything Grotto had told them, men in heavy armor and packing big weapons, all of them dead without a single return hit. Bullets flying through the window, and only Grotto had crept out of it alive. Proto-military, and they’ve been keeping things quiet, it’s been _working_ , but now there are bodies on the floor and the firm could be failing and she’s sitting here waiting with nothing to do but think, and so she’s stressing. She’s worried. _Goddammit, I’m allowed to be worried_. She’s worried about Foggy and this mysterious person who he supposedly _knows_ (because who the hell would Foggy know that could get him more information on a biker gang?) and she’s worried about Karen sitting in here with a target on her back, as Grotto’s ‘wife’, and she’s worried about Matt on his own in the Meatpacking District, wandering through cartel territory without her to watch his back when there’s a new gang they haven’t even heard a whisper of wandering around killing people. _In and out._ As long as they can keep Grotto safe and anonymous until they strike a witpro deal with the DA’s office, then at least that’ll be one thing off their plates. And maybe—

She thinks it’s her imagination, at first. The bang. It’s muffled through the bathroom door and probably two walls. The screams, though, that’s not her imagination at all. There’s a shriek, and another bang, and then people running, and _fuck._ “Shit.” Her taser’s under her skirt, strapped to her thigh, but her bag, her gloves and her mask, they’re all in Grotto’s room with Karen. Which is down the hall. “ _Shit_ ,” she says again, and throws the lock back, pushing the bathroom door open. The nurse’s desk is empty. Louisa’s gone somewhere. On the other side of the swinging doors, someone shrieks. Another gun goes off towards the end of the hall, towards Room 415, and adrenalin hits her like a stevedore. _Shit._ “Get back in your room,” Darcy shouts, as another patient opens the door and peers out into the hallway. “Get in your room and lock the door, don’t open it—”

 _Big,_ she thinks, when she skids around the corner. Big and white and heavy, not in weight but in carriage. His head’s half-shaved— _jarhead_ , she thinks, it’s the first thing that comes to mind, a military buzzcut—and there’s a shotgun in his hand, held loose, like it’s part of him, like Matt and one of his kali sticks. At the other end of the hall, Darcy catches a flash of blonde, and terror snags in her throat. “ _Hey_!”

The guy doesn’t jump. Still, his shot misses, though whether it’s because Karen ducks and screams and drags Grotto along with her, or because Darcy startled him somehow, there’s no way to know. He looks back over his shoulder at her, and—holy shit. A nose that’s been broken. Dark eyes. _Cold_ , she thinks. Then he aims, and Darcy flings herself out of the way as part of the floor explodes up into shards of linoleum and wood. He’d aimed at her feet, she thinks, but it’s still way too close for comfort.

“Stay out of the way,” he says, echoing down the hall.

_Like hell._

Still: by the time she manages to extract herself from the corner she’s landed in (stuck between a potted plant and the wall, it’s fucking impossible) he’s disappeared around the corner. The shotgun goes off again, and again. _Emergency stairwell._ It should be the only place Karen would go, down the stairs and out in a way that keeps most people from being caught in the crossfire. By the time Darcy gets there, flings the door open, he’s gone. Karen and Grotto are nowhere to be seen. She can hear an echo of footsteps three floors above her, slow and steady, like he has all the time in the world.

 _Shit_.

She snags her bag out of Room 415, and runs.

The cameras in the elevator have been disabled. It’s basically the only reason why she can yank off the hoodie and skirt, pull on her mask and gloves. Her hands aren’t shaking. Darcy stows the duffel bag behind a plant on the top floor (the cameras aren’t working up here, either, the whole place is shut down) and then hits the roof access door at a run, taking the stairs three at a time. There are three main buildings in Metro-General, two towers connected by a seven-floor entrance area/intensive care unit in the center, and Jarhead wouldn’t have had time to get to the next one. _Shit, shit, shit, of all the times to hide in the bathroom to worry, Lewis, shit fuck hell shit damn._ Outside, there are no sirens. A helicopter buzzes overhead, but it’s only passing by. The city’s echoing all around, car horns and the buzz of telephone wires, and when she closes the roof access door (quietly, as quietly as she can, and it only just barely creaks as it clicks back into place) there’s no sign of him. Darcy draws her taser from the holster, and steps sideways, around one of the air conditioning units. The air hangs in the air, molasses creeping under her suit. _Shotgun,_ she thinks, and then when she comes around the edge of a second unit and sees the set-up on the wall— _sniper._ A sniper with no shooter and Karen running down to the car on street level, _where the hell—_

There’s a creak. It’s the same little noise that fire escapes will make when someone’s standing behind you, when metal warps to try and take the weight of something much heavier than a cat or a pigeon. Darcy drops, and rolls. It’s the only thing that keeps the back of Jarhead’s shotgun from slamming into her skull. When she pops up again, he’s stepped off the air conditioner, and he has the shotgun pointed right at her face.

“The hell is your problem,” Darcy says, because it’s the only thing she can think to say. “This is a fucking hospital, you unmitigated jackass.”

Jarhead blinks at her, long and slow, and she dives. The shotgun goes off, spraying pellets. Something stings in her shoulder. Darcy rolls, and pops back up behind another ventilation unit, panting, wondering if this had been a tactical error. _Yeah, sure, step right in front of the crazy shooter, Darcy, excellent idea, get his attention and have him fucking come at you with_ —

There’s another creak of metal, and she throws herself out of the way. He’s not aiming for her head, she doesn’t think. It’s kind of hard to aim with a shotgun, but it doesn’t seem like he’s trying to blow her face off. She jumps, back and back, and slips into the shadows, clutching her taser. He could have shot her in the hallway and he didn’t, and that means—well, it could mean a lot of things, really. Her ears are ringing too much for her to be able to think clearly, but he could have killed her and he didn’t and that means that there could be an opening there. She shifts again, from shaft to shaft, keeping low, watching.

Jarhead cracks the shotgun, and she moves. Darcy snags the edge of one of the shafts with both hands, one that’s a head taller than she is, and she heaves herself up and swings, driving her feet as hard as she can into the guy’s shoulder. It’s like hitting a mountain; his weight’s balanced, his arms like rocks, the jacket muffling everything. But he staggers. Somehow, he staggers, and the second cartridge falls out of his hands, cracking on the pavement. Then it’s movement, motion. _You’re faster than you think you are,_ Matt’s told her, over and over, but this guy’s a snake, a striking cobra. (A fist clips her in the jaw and she staggers back but when he comes at her with the other she’s twisted, ducking away and jabbing her taser hard into his side—) Back and forth and all around, and when she ducks, he’s there to meet her. Not acrobatic, she thinks. Not in the same way. Brutal and efficient. (Electricity crackles again but then he’s knocked it from her hand and she can’t dive for it without leaving herself open to his fists—) He moves like he’s trying to break something, and even if the blows don’t land quite right, even if she dances back, she feels every one of them.

She’s still learning. Granted, she’s been working her ass off for the past year, but learning shit like this takes time and effort and a great deal of bloody noses, and she’s not ever going to be finished. (She hits the ground hard, spits, and rolls out of the way of the boot that comes flying for her ribcage—) Even if she’s good—and she _is_ good, she’s not about to not admit that—there’s still a marked difference. He’s _good._ This isn’t for-fun good. This is this-is-my-job good. This is I-have-a-license-to-kill good. (Darcy rolls again, and snags her taser off the ground, turning and firing, and the prongs stick but he doesn’t go down—) This isn’t her league. She’s not sure this is even Matt’s league. This isn’t something she can handle, and there are two options. Turn and run, or just…keep going until he beats her into the ground.

_Like fuck is he touching Karen._

He’s not after Karen, but it doesn’t matter. He’s after Grotto. Grotto’s with Karen. Darcy rolls, and rolls again, circling, staying back, out of reach. Jarhead has a knife, she realizes. On his hip. He hasn’t drawn it yet. Something in the base of her throat snaps, snarls. _Fucking rude._

“You wanna tell me why you want that guy dead?” Darcy says. She’s between Jarhead and the sniper rifle, now. For some reason, he’s stopped marching at her. She’s pretty sure Karen and Grotto are long gone by now, but she doesn’t want to take the chance. “Seriously, there are much bigger fish in this city. What’s so special about him?”

Jarhead doesn’t say anything. He watches her, unblinking, for a long awful moment. Then he wets his lips. “You’re a spitty little cat, aren’t you,” he says, in a voice that makes her think of cavern rock, deep and dark, scraping against her skin. “Never liked cats.”

“Figures.” One of her teeth is loose. At the base of her tongue, something’s buzzing, vibrating. If she snagged the shotgun, she could use it, take out a kneecap, hit him in the ribs. If it’s still loaded, anyway. He’d been putting in new cartridges, and there’s only one on the ground. A rattlesnake curls through her guts. “I’m not that big a fan of dogs, myself.”

“Stay out of the way,” says Jarhead. “I’m not going to hold back just because you’re a woman.”

“Yeah, I noticed.” She spits again. Blood runs down her chin. “Kind of refreshing, actually. You know how many assholes get all twitchy when they see the lipstick?”

Jarhead lunges. She hasn’t had time to reload. When he hits her—one blow, right to the ribs, knocking her sideways and sending her taser flying—it’s no-nonsense, a strike that has her half on the ground and nearly gagging. She still has a bit of air in her lungs, but only just. Jarhead turns, and steps on her taser with one foot, popping the plastic. He’s not looking at her, not anymore. He’s looking down at the street.

Footsteps. He turns. In the same moment, Darcy lunges, and snags the knife off his hip, slashing up and to the side. Something tears. Blood hits the air. Jarhead makes a noise like a grizzly bear, and bares his teeth, but in the same moment there’s a flash of red and black and sticks, and _Jesus fuck_ , _what took you so long, Matthew?_ Darcy takes a huge breath, as big as she can without her ribs stabbing into her, and then another, before heaving herself to her feet. They’re already yards off, a completely different rooftop, fists and feet flying so fast it’s almost impossible to track, but when Jarhead turns, there’s a slash right across the bones of his ribs, crossways, a thin cut that’s leaking blood. _Fucker._ He’d pulled back at the last second. _Fucking bastard._ She swallows air—no broken ribs, she doesn’t think, and her wrist feels like shit but it’s not useless—and then she bolts, not for the fight but for the shotgun and for the vents. It’s with the gun in one hand that she takes the nearest A/C unit at a run, jumping up and over and clambering as high as she can. Heights, she really, really hates heights, but when they get close enough, she doesn’t have to fall too far. When Jarhead bolts for a space between two buildings, she lands hard in front of him. Matt’s behind, blood on his mouth, panting.

“Let’s be clear,” she says. “You take a step, you lose a knee.”

Jarhead bares his teeth again. It could be a smile. She’s really not sure. There’s red on his canines. Then he turns, and clips Matt hard in the jaw with one elbow. She can’t fire without hitting Matt. When he snaps back around, she ducks the second blow, and whips the shotgun around to hit him. The butt of the gun rams right into his knee, hard enough that it reverberates all the way back up into her shoulders, hard enough that she hears something crack. Jarhead _snarls_ , something wild and awful that she’s only ever heard once or twice ( _Matt,_ she thinks, _Fisk_ ) and then her head cracks into the side of the roof access door.

Echoes. The world’s in pieces. The gun falls from her hands. She can’t see. Her eyes cross. There’s only copper, and the echo of a shout, of a bellow.

It can only be for a minute, maybe. Two. She feels sick. When she gets to her feet, her knees nearly give out. Darcy wipes her chin—her glove comes away bloody, her lip stinging—and tries not to puke. _Concussion,_ she thinks, _maybe._ Maybe a concussion. She’s alive, and she’d half-expected not to be, and that’s—painful more than anything, to be honest. When she peels off one glove, touches her fingers to the side of her head, they’re streaked with red. A scrape on her temple. _Foggy’s gonna kill me._

 _Come on, girl._ She can’t sit still. _Karen, come on._ Karen’s gone, probably. Out and safe by now, far away if she’s lucky. Karen’s out, and Grotto’s out, and Claire’s—she has the vague feeling Claire’s gonna kill her. The shotgun’s gone. She yanks her glove back over her fingers, and braces her hand to the wall. “Shit.”  _Matt._ Where—

There. Noises. A blow. When she comes around the corner, Jarhead’s on the ground, and Matt’s standing over him, beside a ledge, frozen. For a second, she can’t process it, the image. There’s a gun. Matt’s standing there, over Jarhead, and Jarhead has a gun, there’s a _gun_ —

“Bang,” says Jarhead, and pulls the trigger.

_Bang._

Matt falls. It’s not slow motion. Here and then gone. The world shatters in a split second, the space between one heartbeat and the next. _Bang_ , and Matt falls. _Bang,_ Matt falls, and there’s a buzzing in her ears that won’t stop. _Bang,_ Matt falls, he’s gone, she can’t see him, he’s dead (— _no, he can’t be, he’s not, he’s not dead, he can’t leave me, he can’t—_ ), there’s a gun and a man on the ground and Matt is _gone,_ and she doesn’t know who’s cracked her chest open but they have and everything in her is gone, the world’s dropped away from under her feet, Matt is gone, and there’s a gun, and he falls—

Matt falls, and she screams.

(— _no_ —)

Images flash. She’s shouting, but she doesn’t understand the words. She wants blood under her nails and a heart in her hands. She wants to tear. There’s a snapshot in the back of her mind of Jarhead, looking at her with a bloody nose. His eyes are big and his lips are parted and she thinks he might be saying something to her, but she can’t hear him. The knife in her hands. Flesh and bone and cloth. Hitting the ground hard. Another shot, over her head, off into the distance. Blood. She can’t keep her feet, and the second time she gets up, Jarhead’s gone. She’s not crying, she doesn’t think. She can’t breathe. There’s a black hole inside her and she’s not sure if it’s not going to drag in everything else.

 _Matt._ She slips when she goes over the other side, drops down hard enough that her ankles scream. _Matt._ He’s sprawled, unmoving, no blood, and there should be blood, she thinks, faintly, there should be blood if he’s been shot, but there’s nothing. When she skids to a stop next to him, her nose is dripping red. She can barely get the helmet off him, with how bad her hands are trembling. His eyes are closed. She opens her mouth, but she can’t scream. No sound comes out. _No._ God, no. _No no no no no, please no._ Darcy reaches out, but she can’t quite touch him. Not like this. Her mouth is open and she should be screaming but there’s nothing left inside her. She can’t. _No, not you, please, please, no, please—_

She can’t process it, at first. The motion. Then he takes a breath, shallow, his ribs rising and falling, and it’s like the universe crashes down onto her head. She should be plastered to the ground. Air catches in her throat. All of a sudden she’s sobbing. “Matt,” she says, and finally she can do it, put her hands to him, tracing his mouth and his jaw, his neck, fumbling. When she tears off her glove and presses her fingers to the artery in his throat, it beats, and she can’t breathe again. She can’t breathe. _Alive,_ she thinks. _Alive, alive, alive, alive—_ “Matt, honey, open your eyes—”

He doesn’t say anything.

( _Bang._ )

“ _Matt_ ,” she says again. She wants to scream. She should be screaming. “Matt, can you hear me? Please just—please, please don’t do this to me, sweetheart, please don’t leave, please open your eyes—”

His heartbeat’s slow. He’s breathing. He’s alive. She smooths his hair back up out of his face and tries not to gag, because they need to get off the roof, they need to _run_ , there are going to be cops everywhere and she’s stuck to the ground because she’d thought he was dead, she’d thought she’d watched him die, and she wants to chase after that bastard with the sniper and beat his head in with a brick, watch something burst, watch him gag on his own blood and choke and fall apart. _Kill him._ She wants to kill him. _Not Matt. You don’t touch him, not ever._ And Matt’s alive but he’s unconscious, he might not wake up for hours, or ever, her head’s a mess, and she can’t move. _In and out. Solve the problem, Darcy._ She can’t solve this, though. She doesn’t know how. She bends, puts her mouth to Matt’s cheek (she doesn’t touch his forehead, she’s too scared she’ll break him) and then folds herself, awkwardly, until she can rest her head to his chest. “Please don’t leave.” She says it into the armor, blood running down the back of her throat. “Matt, you can’t leave me, please, please don’t leave me. You can’t. I need you to wake up, Matt, please—”

“Darcy.” When she lifts her head, Claire’s there, watching her. There’s blood on her scrubs. Her lips go white. “Jesus Christ—”

“Claire—” She can’t finish. “We need to—”

“I know,” Claire says. “Come on.”

“Claire—”

“Darcy, you need to get out of the way.”

“Claire—”

“ _Move_ ,” Claire says, and Darcy bares her teeth and spits.

“ _No._ ”

Claire rocks back and forth on her feet. Then she drops to the ground on Matt’s other side, and gets to work. Darcy can’t watch it. She’s breathing, thin and sharp, her heartbeat echoing in her ears. _Please don’t leave me_ , she thinks, again. _Please don’t._

“I called Foggy,” Claire says, as she touches her fingertips to Matt’s head, light and careful. “He’s on his way over, he shouldn’t be long.”

“He can’t be here.”

“Anyone who needs to get the hell out of here is you. You don’t have much time before the cops find the sniper on the rooftop, he managed to get off a shot judging by the glass on the ground outside. People have been reporting gunshots.”

The words echo inside her ribcage rather than her head. She can’t understand it. “Claire—”

“If the police find you here then you’re gonna get arrested and I’m definitely gonna lose my job, so right now, just—you need to get up and you need to move.”

“Is he okay?”

“I can’t know that for sure.”

She can’t move until she knows. Why does nobody understand that? “Claire, _is he okay_?”

“His skull isn’t cracked,” Claire says. “That’s about all I can tell you.”

Darcy puts her mouth to the back of Matt’s gloved hand. _Come on, Lewis,_ she thinks again. _Come on. He’s alive. Get up._ Her knees won’t cooperate.

“You look like shit,” says Claire, and that finally gets her moving. Darcy rocks back and forth and sways to her feet, still crouched. When she draws one of Matt’s arms over her shoulder, he’s dead weight. Claire seizes his other arm.

“I’m fine,” she says. “Help me get him out of sight.”

 _And then,_ she thinks, _I’m going hunting._


	2. Jungle Living

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NOTE: Manhattan School of Music is a real place, but the scenario I have crafted here is not related to the institution at all. It's actually based around something that happened at my own alma mater, which I am keeping nameless, but like...it was not a pretty incident. So basically, this is me borrowing the name of a real school to be mean, but also discuss the incident. SO! Apologies if any of you, you know, go to MSM.
> 
> Content warnings: blood, homemade first aid bullshit, cuts, bruising, headwounds, moral amiguity/rage issues, some remembered gore (meathooks), and Feelings Of Many Variations.
> 
> Here goes Alix with universe expansion again. But seriously, I couldn't stop giggling every time they said "Mexican cartel" because oh, honey, if you think there's only one in New York City, you are living a sweet, innocent, unicorn-child life. Also, Irish gangs are fascinating. 
> 
> Unbeta'ed, again, but you guys all seriously need to go love on extasiswings, who clarified NY CLS for me and translated law things and was generally amazing in the construction of this. 
> 
> Songs that really, really fit Lilith this season: Missile, by DOROTHY. Also, Punchin' Bag, by Cage the Elephant. (I am building new playlists; if you guys are looking for music mixes to do with this series, I have some up on 8tracks under shuofthewind. Basically, Alix never stops thinking about this shit.)
> 
> I will get to your reviews tonight/tomorrow!

It takes four hours for Matt to wake up.

Claire can’t stay. She gets them down onto the ground, into an alley, and then she has to dart back to Metro-General before anyone realizes she’s gone. (She catches Darcy before she goes, wraps her arms around her as best she can and puts her mouth to Darcy’s forehead even through the mask, and that nearly drags her into catatonia. She can’t deal with kindness, right now. She can’t manage it. She feels like an unsheathed blade, and anyone who touches her is going to be sliced to pieces.)

Darcy calls Karen three times. It all goes to voice mail.

It’s twenty minutes of waiting and watching the play of red and blue lights over the brick of the wall before Foggy hisses her name. He goes dead-white when he sees it, the wreck of them, Matt’s mask off and gore running down the side of his head and Darcy covered in bruises and smears. Her nose isn’t broken, somehow, but it’s still bleeding. Blood’s running over her lips. “Jesus,” he says, and then again. “Jesus _Christ._ ”

“I can’t carry him,” she says. “Where’s Karen?”

“She’s not with you?”

“Ben loaned her his car. She took Grotto somewhere.” Darcy stands, staggers. Matt’s too heavy. Foggy darts around to his other side, and pulls an arm over his shoulders. “Be careful.”

“What happened?”

( _Bang._ It keeps echoing in her head, over and over. _Bang._ Blood and the knife in her hands. _Bang._ Matt falling. _Bang._ Jarhead driving her down into the ground. _Bang._ )

“Later, Foggy,” she says.

Foggy presses his lips together, and nods.

It’s Nobu all over again. Lurching through alleyways like drunkards, trying to stay out of sight. The sun’s rising when they finally get to the apartment, finally make their way to the elevators (and they do take the elevators, because dragging Matt up the fire escape to the roof access door would be impossible). When she pushes the button for the sixth floor, it leaves a bright red print behind.

Onto the couch, she thinks. Or not the couch, the bed. The bed’s a better idea. They strip Matt’s uniform off, leave it on the floor. The helmet she leaves on the coffee table, the raw crack in it like the remnants of an earthquake. A natural disaster. Foggy goes and cleans the blood out of the elevator, wiping up drops and trying to eliminate the trail. A few minutes and half a millennium later, he’s back, and he stands at the end of the bed and watches her long enough that her skin starts to creep.

“Darcy,” he says. “You should change.”

“I’m fine.” She doesn’t look away from Matt’s face. There’s blood smeared down his temple. They should at least put him in clothes, she thinks, but that would mean moving his head, and she really doesn’t want to risk that right now. “It doesn’t matter.”

“You look like you just walked through a massacre, you need to at least change.” He swallows. “You’re gonna stain the blanket.”

“I don’t care,” says Darcy woodenly, and keeps her hand fisted around Matt’s. “I really—really could not give less of a shit about the blanket right now.”

Foggy considers that. Then he wanders off into the kitchen, and starts clattering through cabinets.  Darcy lifts Matt’s hand, puts her mouth to his knuckles and leaves it there for as long as long as she can. There’s a terrible bruise building up on his forehead, black, a lump like a goose egg. _If it rises,_ she thinks, _then it’s probably not swelling inside._ But there’s no way to know that, not for sure. Not without scans and a hospital visit they can’t afford. _Hi, nurses: please ignore the fact that my blind boyfriend is covered with bruises and knife scars. Also please ignore that I look like someone beat the shit out of me. Please ignore all of that and just tell me if he has a traumatic brain injury and if he’s going to fall down and die. Please just tell me that much_.

( _Bang._ )

“Where’s Karen?” she says.

“I haven’t heard from her.”

She fumbles her phone out of her pocket, and hits speed dial again. It rings out to voice mail. She needs to go look for Karen, she thinks, needs to search for Karen and Grotto, but it’s like she’s swallowed in ice. _She would have gone to the police,_ she thinks, leaving the phone on her lap. Karen would have taken Grotto straight to the police. Armed protection. They would have been able to give her enough of a head-start, getting in Jarhead’s way, that she’d probably been long out of sight before—

( _I’m going to kill him,_ she thinks again, and it’s a stone falling down a hole, clattering against the sides, echoing rock. She thinks if Matt woke up and heard her say it, he’d be horrified. _We hold each other back,_ she thinks. _We’re supposed to hold each other back._ Right now, she doesn’t care.)

( _Bang._ )

Something inside her is breaking.

It’s a decade before Foggy comes back with a bowl of water and a washcloth. He sets them on the bedside table. “Mirror,” he says, and pulls it out of his pocket. Darcy turns, and blinks at him, slowly. “If he wakes up and finds you covered in blood, he’s gonna be scared shitless.”

She looks down at her hands, at the smears. Mostly her own blood, she thinks. Jarhead’s knife is still tucked into her boot. “Oh.”

“I’m gonna get the kit,” Foggy says, and vanishes into the kitchen again.

Darcy stands, and strips. There’s bruising all down her ribs, on her hip and on her back, smearing. One’s in the shape of a boot heel. She pulls a shirt over her head at random (it smells like Matt, and her eyes are burning, all of a sudden) and then drops back down onto the bed. She’s not wearing pants, but she’s pretty sure Foggy isn’t going to care. The knife she leaves on the floor. Foggy drags a chair into the bedroom, one of the folding chairs, and sets it up across from her. “Look at me, will you?”

Darcy turns her head, and watches him, unblinking. Foggy’s still pale, pupils flaring wide, but his mouth is set when he lifts her chin with two fingers and starts dabbing at her cheek with the wet washcloth.

“Darcy,” he says again. “What happened?”

“You first.” She eyes his cheek. There’s a bruise swelling there, fat and purple. “You look like you were thrown into a wall.”

“Pinned to a pool table, actually.”

Something very, very cold cracks on the back of her head, and trickles along her spine. “By who?”

It’s not Darcy who says it, she thinks. The vowels are too long. Not how she sounds when she’s Lilith, not quite, but far too close to the edge for Foggy. She tries to keep it under control, when Foggy’s around. His lips go bloodless. “Jesus,” says Foggy. The hand that’s pressing the washcloth to her bloody cheek is trembling. “Don’t look like that. It’s fine, it worked out. All okay.”

“ _Who_?”

“Darcy, I don’t need you to go crazy mama bear on me, okay, just—”

“Foggy, _what did you do_?”

“I went to talk to the Dogs of Hell, okay?” he snaps, and throws the washcloth into the corner. Foggy fumbles the alcohol out of Matt’s kit, the gauze. “I knew someone a long time ago who became a full-patched member, I thought, you know, if I could talk to Smitty I could get a better idea of what the hell is going on right now.”

She legitimately cannot speak. She opens her mouth, and shuts it again. Then she wets her lips, and says, “Foggy, are you _fucking crazy?_ ”

Well. She means to say it, anyway. She shouts it, instead.

Foggy snaps back, away from her. “I don’t need to hear that from you right now.”

“Are you _insane_? You go talk to a motorcycle gang _without backup_ —”

“Like it’s any different from what you and Matt do—”

“At least we don’t go alone!” She’s _screaming,_ high and cracked, because it’s not enough that she nearly lost Matt tonight, it’s not enough that she had to see him shot, now she has to hear this, hear that Foggy went and put himself into the worst possible position and that she hadn’t been there and that he could have _died_ — “ _At least we tell you we’re going_!”

“You don’t get the moral high ground with this one, Darcy!” He takes her chin in one hand, puts the cotton swab to a cut on her cheek. It burns. “Neither you nor Matt get the moral high ground with me when it comes to this shit, not _ever_ , not when you look like you’ve been through a shredder and Matt won’t wake up and you won’t tell me _why—_ ”

“You can’t lecture me for putting myself in danger and worrying you and then turn around and do the same thing to me and not _tell_ me—”

“Darcy—”

“ _You could have died_!”

“You nearly die every night! Matt nearly dies every night! Don’t tell me it isn’t the same!”

She’s squeezing Matt’s hand so hard she’s surprised she hasn’t woken him, hard enough that the bones are shifting under her fingers, hard enough that her knuckles have gone white and her wrist aches with the force of it. “The difference is _I tell you_ , Foggy! I tell you—I _tell_ you when I’m going to do something dangerous, I signed up for this, I threw myself into this war, I _prep_ for it, I don’t just walk up to a bar and asked to see a gangster with nothing more than my briefcase and my old iPod—”

“You weren’t there, you have no idea—”

“Then tell me you did something to protect yourself!” She shuts her eyes. Tears are streaking down her cheeks. “Did you tell anyone? Did you say _anything_? Did you get a gun, did you have backup? Did anyone even know where you were going?”

He wavers. “It’s the same.”

“It’s not.”

“It _is_.”

“It’s _not_ , because if I’d gone in I would have been able to defend myself. You walked in and trusted them not to kill you when they’re jumpy as hell and getting—getting slaughtered by trained mercenaries, okay, they would have shot you in the head you if you’d so much as said a word wrong. You don’t trust these people, Foggy. You _can’t_.”

His fingers are steady on her cheek as he throws the first piece of cotton aside, and dabs a second one into the little bowl of alcohol. “There may have been a tactical miscalculation.”

“Yeah, no shit!”

“I can do without the lecture.” Foggy scrapes into a cut on her forehead, and Darcy spits like a cat. “Besides, it was productive. I just thought that Smitty would, you know, still be alive, but—”

“ _Jesus Christ—_ ”

“—I’m fine, I made it out okay, and just—we can set aside how hypocritical you’re being right now—”

“There is a _big_ difference between going in armed and going in like a lamb to slaughter, Foggy—”

“I know!” He pushes the swab hard into the cut on her eyebrow, and Darcy winces. “Shit. I know.” He can’t look at her, not really. “I just—I wanted to help.”

Darcy looks at her empty hand, palm up on her knee. Then she catches Foggy’s hand. Alcohol smears between their fingers, cold and faintly pink with her blood. Foggy flicks away the cotton ball, and squeezes her fingers hard, so that she’s linked on either side, holding on to Matt’s limp hand with her scarred one, and Foggy’s strong, regular, unbattered hand with the other, callused and warm and alive. She lets out a shaky breath. “You can help,” she says, finally. “I’m—I want you to help, if you want to help. You help by being here, but if you want to do more, I’m—I’d be a hypocrite to try and stop you. But just— _please_ don’t do that again. Please don’t throw yourself into something that could kill you without at least telling one of us, Foggy, please.”

“Darcy—”

“ _Please._ ”

He looks at Matt. Foggy knots their hands together. “I promise, okay? Just—I promise.” His lips go thin. “But if there’s something I can do to help, I’m going to. From now on. I’m—I’m really sick of watching you two come back beat to shit and not being able to do anything.”

Darcy lifts Matt’s hand to her mouth again. She can’t speak.

“What happened?” Foggy says, for the last time.

She’s trying to find the words when the phone rings. _Karen,_ the ID reads, Karen and a photo of her on the screen, posing like one of Charlie’s Angels with Kate. _Hell’s Kitchen Angels,_ Kate had joked, and it’s a good shot, the pair of them back to back in front of Satan’s Photocopier with finger guns held up by their faces, laughing. She thinks her ID photo on Karen’s phone is its mate, Darcy sighting down her arm with her forefinger pointing right into the camera. She answers before she thinks, heaving a breath. “Karen?”

“I’m okay,” Karen says without preamble. Her voice is shaky, but steady. “I’m okay. Grotto and I are okay. We’re at the police station.”

“Did he follow you?”

“I haven’t seen him. I’m—I’m guessing you’re the reason he stopped taking potshots at us as he drove away, just—are you okay?”

Her eyes well up. “I’m fine.”

“Darcy—”

“I’m _fine._ Stay with Grotto, I’ll—I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“You will _not_ ,” Foggy snaps. “You’re not going anywhere right now, you’re—you’re letting me tape your nose first, at least, because I’m pretty sure it’s broken—”

“My nose isn’t broken, Foggy.”

“Foggy’s there with you?” Karen says, and Darcy hands Foggy the phone without a word. She can’t work up the energy right now. She hands Foggy the phone, and she settles the mirror on her lap, taking another cotton swab and going to work. Her face, she thinks, is a wreck. _Not a fan. Definitely not a fan._ She can’t remember how half of it happened. She’s pretty sure it wasn’t before—

( _Bang._ )

 _I want to kill him,_ she thinks again. Matt’s alive, but everything keeps circling back to that. _I want to kill him._ There’s a monster in her throat, clawing its way up and out, snaring logic and strangling it without a sound. _I want to kill him. I want him dead. He tried to kill Matt, I want him dead._

Is this what Matt had felt, she wonders? When Fisk tried to kill her? _I want him dead,_ he’d said, in a voice she’s never heard from him since, husky and rough and inhuman. _I want to kill him for what he did to you._ She thinks if she says it aloud, she’ll sound the exact same, like the words are peeling away the last of her skin. Like she’s voicing something that’s welding into her soul. When she looks at the floor, the stolen knife is still laying there, naked and bloody. A hunting knife, she thinks. Or a ranger’s knife. Heavy-duty, weighted hilt. Serrated edge at the base. She doesn’t touch it. That would mean getting up. It would mean letting go of Matt, moving away, seizing it and slipping it into her boot again, open and ready to cut. _I need a sheath for it_ , she thinks. She doesn’t know blade-work, exactly, but she can at least carry it for now.

“My taser’s gone,” she says, suddenly. She’d forgotten. Jarhead had broken her taser. “Fuck.”

“What?” Foggy plugs his ear, turns the phone a little so Karen won’t hear anything. “What’d you say?”

“Nothing.”

“Darcy—”

“My taser’s broken.” She turns away from him. “It’s nothing.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she can see Foggy watching her. Darcy doesn’t look around. Finally, he resettles the phone, and says something to Karen about being in in an hour or so. Damage control, probably. It’ll take at least that long for Grotto to make a statement, for Karen to make hers. At least that long, because they’re going to have to deal with the cut in Grotto’s side first, and Jesus Christ, he’s pulled them into so much shit, the twitchy guy in Josie’s with his finger on the trigger.   

What had Jarhead said to Anita Schaeffer? _Stay out of the way._

_Like hell._

Foggy settles in the seat across from her again. He leaves her phone on the bedspread. Darcy licks her lips, and waits for him to go back to the job he’s given himself, patching up her outsides while her insides wreak havoc. “What’d Karen say?”

“They’re at the station,” he says. “Ben’s there already. They have Grotto in holding while everyone and their mother goes absolutely apeshit over everything that happened at the hospital. It’ll take a while before anyone remembers they’re even there, I think, even if the DA’s gonna get nuts over this. Which, let’s be real, they’re probably going to be. A hospital?”

“You should go,” Darcy says. Alcohol buzzes into the cut on her lower lip. “Someone needs to be there with her. Karen’s learning, but she’s not a lawyer, she can’t advise Grotto on what he needs to do.”

“I talked to him.” Foggy smooths an adhesive strip over the worst cut, the one on her temple where she’d hit the side of the building. Darcy flinches, and squeezes her eyes shut. “He knows not to talk to anyone until I get there. I’ll head out as soon as I’m sure you’re not gonna run off and—I don’t know. Jump off a building. Take potshots at stray cats. Take out your anger in a way that is not conducive to regular people.” He peeks at her through his lashes, and then adds, “That was meant to be a joke.”

“Nothing’s very funny to me right now.”

“Who did this to you?” He peels a bandaid open, and settles it over a cut just beneath her eyebrow. “How many guys?”

“ _Guys_ is a misnomer.” Darcy grits her teeth. _Jesus,_ the cuts sting. “One. Big. Strong, but not—not unnaturally. Um—I don’t know. Military, I think.”

“Did he split off from the group, or—”

“Foggy, you don’t understand.” She breathes in through her nose. “It was one guy. One guy shot up the hospital. One—one guy was trying to kill Grotto. One guy did this to me. One guy—” — _shot Matt._ Darcy bites her lip, and then winces. “One guy did this,” she says instead. “Just—not an army. Just one man.”

“One man,” Foggy says.

“Yes.”

Foggy looks down into the battered black kit. He sighs. “There’s no way any of this is going to end well. Calling it now.”

“Amen to that,” Darcy says, and lets him stick another bandaid over her nose.

Foggy leaves about an hour later, after he’s absolutely certain (“You promise?” “I promise.” “You _swear_?” “For God’s sake, Foggy—”) that neither she nor Matt are going to go anywhere without telling him first. (“Matt really shouldn’t be going anywhere, but I’m not gonna be the one to try and tell him that.” “He’s crossing that threshold over my dead body.”) Unfortunately, that means that she now has time to herself to panic in private. She doesn’t melt down, not exactly. She goes into the bathroom, and she inspects every single bruise and cut place she’d been hiding from Foggy, because it gives her something to do rather than watch Matt sleep. There aren’t many places—a split between her ribs where she’d been kicked; a livid red-purple mark across her hip—but there’s a flecking hole in her left shoulder with a shotgun pellet inside, a little metal lump inside her skin. She has to pick it out with tweezers, and that—shit. It’s not enough to knock her back from the edge of Lilith, or whatever it is that’s tangling between her ribs, but it’s enough to make her stop and think. After it’s done, she hides in her hands, and breathes. _In and out, Lewis._

( _Bang._ )

She can’t let herself think right now. She grabs her computer, and clambers up onto the bed next to Matt to listen to him breathe.

Ben’s already posted an update. _SHOOTING AT METRO-GENERAL HOSPITAL; ALLEGED LINKS TO KITCHEN IRISH MASSACRE_. There’s a note at the top that says something to the effect of _will be expanded as more information becomes available,_ which, goddammit, Urich. She’d honestly kill for some of Ben’s old cop contacts, because there are factoids in here she’s pretty sure that the DA would kill to learn where he picked up. Also, Karen’s credited. Not by name, for obvious reasons, but generally when it comes to shit that Nelson, Murdock, and Lewis get into, anyone labeled _a source who would prefer to remain anonymous_ means Karen, or Darcy. Or Darcy-as-Lilith, but that’s a completely different story.

(She and Matt get into spitty cat-fights occasionally about how many people now know who Darcy is, out of the mask. Ben’s on the list, though that was kind of unavoidable. Both Melvin and Betsy, though that one was unavoidable too, considering Melvin had to measure literally every part of her body to make sure that the suit would fit right, and Melvin tells Betsy everything always. Father P. And then there’s Jessica Jones, who wouldn’t ever rat Darcy out, but at the same time it’s kind of unsettling to think that a private investigator knows their names and faces. But yeah. Occasionally Lilith and Ben Urich will have heart-to-hearts, and Daredevil can just suck it up and deal with it. It’s not like the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen hasn’t had his own chats with _The Urich Report_ in the months since Fisk went down _._ )

Her limbs are twitching. She can’t sit still. She looks through _The Urich Report,_ shuts the computer again, stares at the wall. Opens the laptop back up and stops halfway through a crawl of the #samsonanddelilahofhell tag on Twitter. She needs to _move._ Matt’s unconscious and he could be dying and she can’t just sit here, waiting for it to get fixed. There’s Jarhead to find, she thinks, and her guts twist into sailors’ knots. There’s Jarhead to find and kill, for this. _You try to kill him, I try to kill you. Fair game._ And that shouldn’t feel as _wild_ as it does, it shouldn’t feel like her skin’s coming to life and her whole body’s on fire. _You try to kill him, I try to kill you._ She turns, threads her fingers into Matt’s hair, tugging until something settles way back behind her teeth. _We don’t kill,_ she tells herself. Even when she says it aloud, it doesn’t quite ring true. “We don’t kill.”

( _Bang,_ he’d said, and pulled the trigger, and Matt had dropped like a stone, and she can’t remember what she did after that, only that there was movement and screaming and blood—)

She’s surfing messageboards—there are more than a few cult followings of Daredevil and Lilith, not to mention all the other superhero junkies that haunt the city and keep their ears to the ground; even if their information is usually shit, there are gems sometimes—when next to her, Matt shifts, and makes a soft sound. Darcy has the laptop on Foggy’s borrowed chair and his hand in hers again before he can do more than blink. “Hey,” she says, hanging over him, and Matt wrinkles his nose when her hair tickles at his jaw. “Hey, how are you feeling?”

Matt rolls his eyes up in a silent _Christ, I feel like shit_ before wetting his lips. “Like I was kicked in the head by an angry mule.”

“That’s what happens when you get shot,” she says. She folds her other hand around his, hiding his fingers away. “You shouldn’t be moving. Claire says you don’t have a cracked skull, but you probably have a—a really bad concussion, and like…there’s no way we can actually tell if something’s bleeding unless we take you to the hospital. Which is, you know. Out of the picture.”

He blinks, slowly, tipping his head. Even that has him wincing. “You’re bleeding,” he says, after a moment. Which, yeah, she is, but that is so far from the point right now, holy shit.

“You were shot. I had the crap kicked out of me. Don’t change the subject.” She puts her fingers to the lump, skirting the edges very carefully. No shifting pieces. “Can you tell if anything’s wrong? Or is your head just as swollen as it normally is?”

“I haven’t had enough aspirin to respond to that the way it deserves.” He shifts, and shuts his eyes. “Jesus. Some mule.”

“Some bullet.”

“I don’t remember that part too well.” He clenches his jaw for a moment. “Help me sit up.”

She’s pretty sure he wouldn’t have asked, if Foggy were here. She doesn’t mention it. Darcy shifts, and wraps her hand around his wrist, lets him curl his fingers around the bones in her arm and hold on. He moves like every part of him aches, and she’s seen him move stiffer, before—after Nobu was worse—but it’s still making her heart hurt. ( _Bang._ ) He settles with his back to the headboard, and breathes deep through his nose before reaching out and touching his fingertips to one of the bruises on her cheek. “You okay?”

“I’m bruised. No breaks, no big holes, no, you know, bullets to the head.”

“Should’ve noticed the gun.” He rests his hand to her shoulder, and swipes his thumb under the collar of the T-shirt, into the dip above her collarbone, back and forth. Darcy folds one leg up under the other, watching him. “Ankle holster. I should have—I should have noticed it. It was sloppy.”

“Yeah,” Darcy says, her voice shaking. “Yeah, no shit.”

“What happened?”

“Before or after he had a gun to your head?”

Matt winces again. She’s not sure if it’s because of what she said or how she said it, brittle and crackling at the edges like dead leaves. “I’m okay, Darcy.”

“This is—” She can’t speak. ( _Bang._ ) “He shot you, Matt.”

“And I’m okay, so.”

“You don’t understand.” She rests her hand to his chest, to one of the scars under his clavicle. “Matt, he shot you. There’s—there’s a crack in the helmet. He was trying to kill you, and you—you can barely move right now, that’s not anywhere close to okay.”

( _Bang,_ he’d said, and the shadows lunge up her throat again, into her mouth, because _you don’t do that, you don’t get to do that to him and survive it—_ )

“I’m not so sure he was trying to kill me so much as keep me from following him.” Matt scuffs the backs of his fingers over her cheek. “I made a mistake, that’s all. I’m all right.”

“Yeah, because shooting you in the head is definitely the same thing as saying _go away, I’m ollying out._ ” Darcy shakes her head, and stands, heading into the bathroom to grab the aspirin. Frankly, she’s tempted to just…put Vicodin in his water and knock him out for a day, but first of all he’d be able to smell it, and secondarily, they don’t keep anything stronger than aspirin in the apartment for a reason. (He’d told her, maybe three months into this, that the last time he’d been on heavy anesthetic he’d been nine and in the hospital after the chemical accident. “I can’t focus when I’m on them,” he’d said. “I can’t filter out the noise. I can’t do anything.” So, yeah. Vicodin’s out.) She knocks a few back herself, and fills the bathroom glass at the sink. “I really—you scared the living shit out of me, so I would really appreciate it if I could just sit there and watch you breathe for a little while, okay? Just—”

He’s standing. Darcy nearly loses her grip on the cup. It’s only Matt curling his fingers around the base of it that keeps the thing from shattering on the floor. “Thanks.”

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” she says, and _there’s_ the panic. It burns into her blood, racing like fire as she watches him swallow the aspirin, step around her and head for the kitchen. “Matt, _get back in bed_.”

“We don’t have time for me to lie around.” There’s an awful bruise on his back, lancing sideways across his spine like someone took a stick to him. He’s moving very carefully as he passes the coffee table, planting each foot, like he actually has to consciously think about it. “If he’s after Grotto, still, then wherever Grotto is, he’s in danger.”

“Grotto’s at the police station,” Darcy says, and follows after him. “Grotto’s with Karen and Foggy, Grotto’s fine—Matt, sit _down_.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine! I’m starting to wonder if you actually have brain damage, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“My job,” he says. “How long have they been at the 15th?”

Darcy makes a noise like a cat that’s had its tail stepped on, and says, “We are _not talking about this right now._ ”

“I can manage a trip to the police station.”

“No.” She steps in front of him. Matt rocks to a stop. “ _No_.”

“Darcy—”

“ _You are not fine._ ” It cracks like ice on her tongue. “You are _so far_ from fine. You were shot. I thought you were dead, Matt, do you understand? You were _shot_ and I thought you were _dead_ and you can barely keep your feet right now, don’t you stand there and tell me you’re _fine_.”

There’s a flicker. Matt scoffs a little, and tries to angle past her, but Darcy steps in the way again, back and forth. “I can’t just sit here.”

“If you leave this apartment right now you are doing it over my dead fucking body, Matthew Murdock! I will tie you to the goddamn bed if I have to—”

“Darcy, I don’t—”

“Sit down,” Darcy says, and when he doesn’t move, she puts her hands on his chest and she pushes. It’s barely even a touch, nowhere close to how hard she shoves him during sparring, but he staggers, nearly hits the floor. Matt catches himself just in time. “Matt,” she says again, and her voice is all Lilith, drawling and harsh and low. “ _Sit down_.”

He sits. He looks like he wants to take a swing at her, or a wall, or a ‘banger, but he backs up, into the couch, and he sits. Darcy stands in front of him with her hands clenched and shaking. She can taste bile.

“Now you listen to me.” When he turns his face away from her, Darcy reaches out, and puts her palm to his cheek, turning him back. “ _Listen to me_. You could have brain damage. You can barely stand, and I don’t care if you’re a Murdock and can get the shit beat out of you and still go ten-to-one with a bunch of Russian mobsters, you are not going _anywhere,_ and especially not right now. If that means I sit here and stare at you to make sure of it, then I swear to God, Matt, I will be sitting _on_ you just to make sure you don’t take a goddamn step.”

The levity vanishes. Matt’s mouth twists. “I’m not a kid, you can’t just—pin me up in the corner.”

“Don’t you fucking patronize me.” Her hands are shaking again. “ _I thought you were dead,_ do you understand me? Until I know for sure that you’re not going to fall down and die then you are fucking grounded. You are not going _anywhere_ , and you are _not_ going to be heading off to pick a fight with the guy who shot you in the head because you’re pissed he managed to kick your ass—”

“That’s not what this is!”

“That’s exactly what this is, don’t you bullshit me!”

“I don’t need you to mother me, Darcy!”

She nearly punches him in the face. Darcy shuts her eyes, breathes in and out through her nose. There’s a flicker around his mouth that might be regret— _better fucking be regret_ —but his jaw is set in a stubborn line, and she could _kill_ him sometimes, she really could, she loves him but sometimes she wants to _strangle_ him, beat his head in with a crowbar—

( _Bang._ ) 

Her stomach lurches, and knots into pieces.

“You’re not going anywhere.” She pulls her hair back, and ties it up. “You’re not—you’re not leaving this apartment. Not until you can keep your feet. Not until I know, for certain, that you’re not going to die in our bed, okay? Not until I know. You promise me, Matt.”

“Darcy—”

“ _Promise me._ ”

He presses his lips together. “He can’t just—we can’t let him run around and kill whoever he wants, I can’t just sit here.”

“Yes, you fucking can.”

“Darcy—”

“Don’t fight me right now.” She heaves a breath. She’s right on the edge, Darcy and Lilith. She hasn’t left the edge since Foggy. Since Jarhead. She’s dancing on the point of a knife. _Don’t fucking fight with me right now, Matthew Murdock._ “Hitting the police station wouldn’t be like hitting the hospital, there’s—there are people with guns everywhere, people who know that this guy is after Grotto. Karen will have told Brett everything she can, you know that, and Brett's not stupid. He’ll have the whole of the 15th on high alert. Nobody’s getting in there today.”

“But—”

“If this son of a bitch is anything close to smart, he’s not gonna go anywhere near it. Grotto’s safe, for now. And as soon as I’m certain you’re not going _anywhere_ , I’m going to go and make sure everything’s okay, so just—just sit down and stay there.”

“I can’t just do nothing!”

“And I can’t watch you die because you were too fucking stubborn to sit down and _rest_ after you nearly had your brains blown out over a goddamn rooftop!”

“Can you stop saying that?” Matt snags the glass off of the coffee table. “I’m alive, I’m fine. He missed, all right?”

“That’s not the point! This guy isn’t someone you mess around with, Matt, you can’t fight him when you can barely walk a straight line—”

“We leave him out there, people are gonna die!”

“Do you think I don’t know that?” She wants to break something. She wants to seize the glass from him and throw it against the wall. “Jesus Christ! Do you think I don’t know that the longer we do nothing the more blood’s gonna spill? I’m not fucking stupid, Matt, so don’t treat me like I am!”

“You didn’t see what he did to Los Milagros, Darcy, he didn’t just—he didn’t just shoot them from a rooftop, he hung them to die on meathooks in a packing plant. By their throats, through their chests. One of them through the head, just—we can’t let him get any further away than he already has—”

“And I promise you if you go running after him half-cocked then one or the both of us is going to die, all right, so for God’s sake, sit down and _shut the fuck up_!”

Matt opens his mouth, and then shuts it again. He blinks. Darcy whirls away and goes to put on some goddamn pants.

He’s still sitting there when she gets back in to the living room, her hair wound back and her yoga pants pinching the bruises on her ribcage. Matt hasn’t budged, turned towards the window and the sunlight spilling over the floor of the apartment. When she goes to mess with the coffee machine, her hands are trembling enough that she spills grounds all over the counter. “Shit.”

“Darcy.”

“I don’t like it when you make me shout you down.” She fumbles the sponge, and knocks half the grounds onto the floor. _Shit._ Her ankle’s aching in a steady, pounding rhythm, beating in time with her heart. “I shouldn’t need to yell at you every time you get hurt.”

“You know what could happen if we slow down.”

“God, will you just—” Darcy punches the counter, once, hard, enough that her knuckles scrape and bruise. “ _Fuck_!”

“Darcy,” Matt says, and she stops. Lilith slides back down her throat, fades. “I don’t—”

“He shot you in the head, Matt.” She can barely get the words out. She’s never going to stop seeing it, she doesn’t think. She’s not sure she’ll be able to shut her eyes without it playing out again, and again, and again, the shot, _bang_ , Matt whipping back and to the side and falling over the edge, the sudden yawning emptiness inside her ribs, she can’t _stop_. She can’t. “He had a gun on you and he shot you and you went down and I was too far away to stop it. I thought you were dead, and I can’t—I can’t go through that again. I thought you were dead, and I wasn’t—”

 _Me,_ she thinks. Not her, not anymore. Not Lilith either. Something darker. Something worse. It’s leaping up her throat, staining shadows over her teeth, and she can’t force it back into its box.

_I want to kill him._

“I saw you die,” she says, finally. “I saw—I saw you die. I saw you shot in front of me, and I couldn’t stop it. Don’t tell me that you’re fine, goddamn you. Don’t you fucking dare.”

He doesn’t say anything for a long time. Then, carefully, he lifts his hands. Darcy leaves the kitchen, leaves the coffee grounds, and slides into him, winds around him until she can hide her face in his throat and breathe, try her damnedest not to shake. “I didn’t mean to scare you, sweetheart,” he says, quietly, and her throat squeezes.

“Don’t call me that while I’m pissed at you.”

There’s a buzzing in his ribs that might be a laugh. “What do I call you, then?”

“How about _I’m sorry, Darcy, I scared the living shit out of you and I’m not ever going to do anything that stupid again_?”

“Bit of a mouthful,” he says, and settles around her. _Alive,_ she thinks, putting her mouth to his throat. _Alive and alive and mine and alive,_ and it might not be settling the shadows back under her skin but it’s at least keeping her heart from shattering inside her chest. “I’ll stick with sweetheart.”

“Yeah, well, not right now, you don’t.”

“Darcy.” His throat works. “I didn’t—I messed up. I should have been paying more attention. I’m sorry.”

“I didn’t notice the ankle holster either, it wasn’t just you.” She shakes her bangs back out of her face. Her head throbs. “I just need you to sit, okay? I need for you to sit and not do anything and not, you know, die. For twelve hours. I need that from you right now, please, I don’t—please, Matt. Please don’t make me fight you over this, please just—please just sit, for _once_ , take care of yourself for once, if not for you then for me. Please.”

Matt curls his arms around her, and holds on. “How’s your head?”

“About the way it would be after someone threw me into a wall.” She fists her hand up, rests her fingers to his heart. “I’m doing better than you. If I _am_ concussed, it’s no worse than after the Goodmans. Arguably I could go and help Foggy with the witpro agreement, but—but I really don’t want you out of my sight right now, so.”

“Don’t trust me?”

“Not when you might possibly have brain damage, no.”

Matt huffs into her ear, and goes quiet. It’s about as good a compromise as she’s going to get, she thinks. She’s kind of proud of it, in a sick, concussed sort of way. Darcy shuts her eyes, and holds onto him, ignoring the heat and the blaze of the sun on the back of her neck. His heart’s beating. He’s breathing, his heart’s beating, she can feel his lungs working and his ribs moving and the warmth of him, and he’s not going anywhere if she can help it. Not ever.

( _Bang._ )

“We need to find out who he is.” It tickles at her ear, the words, her hair, the way he breathes out when he says it like something the weight of Mt. Everest has settled on his shoulders. “We need to find him and stop him.”

“We will.” _And I’m going to kill him._ She swallows that back down. _He’s alive. Matt’s alive. I want to kill him for what he did._ “He’s—he’s kind of carving a pretty big trail.”

“He’s been trained.”

“I gathered that much, believe it or not.”

“He’s good.” Matt rests his lips to her hair again, thinking. “He’s very good. It’s not—he’s been trained, but there were tricks he was using that you only get out of experience.”

Darcy shuts her eyes. “He called me _little cat._ I don’t know if that’s patronizing or not.”

“He spoke to you?”

“Just to tell me to get out of the way.”

“Hm,” Matt says.

Darcy taps out a pattern on his collarbone.

“Promise me you won’t go after him alone,” he says, when the silence starts to crack.

“Matt—”

“Promise me, Darcy, please.” The scab behind her ear scrapes a little when he touches his thumb to the skin there, very softly. “Don’t go after him alone.”

She thinks he might say something else, might say _promise me you won’t try to kill him,_ but he doesn’t. The way his hands shift against her back, though—she’s pretty sure he knows exactly what’s boiling in her throat, in her guts. Darcy swallows. “Only if you promise me you won’t do just that while I have my back turned.”

He hisses through his teeth. When he smiles, it’s not quite human anymore, more devil than anything. “You want me to cross my heart?”

“Hope to die,” she says. “Stick a needle in your eye.”

“Wouldn’t do much, in my case.”

She says, “Don’t go after him without me, Matt. Promise me.”

He says, “I promise. Do you?”

It burns her tongue. “Yes.”

When he makes the X over his heart, half a joke, she covers his hand with hers, and presses it flat over the scars.

.

.

.

 **The Urich Report (@theurichreport):** Unnamed gunman opens fire in Metro-General Hospital; exclusive interview with eyewitness. tur.co/…

 **Hero Watch (@maskwatchnyc)** : Right in DD and L’s backyard, this one #samsonanddelilahofhell #whereintheworldistheangelofmercy

 **Hero Watch (@maskwatchnyc):** @theurichreport Heard whispers about a civilian getting in the guy’s way; do we have another hero in our midst?

 **The Urich Report (@theurichreport)** : @maskwatchnyc So far that’s unsubstantiated. Ask around yourself if you’re interested.

 **Hawkeye, Not Hawkgal (@hisforhawtass)** : @theangelofmercy I swear to god I leave the pair of you alone for five minutes

.

.

.

She’s not sure how long she sits there, with him. It’s too hot to keep managing it, really, but she doesn’t want to let go, so she sits there and suffers with her head on Matt’s shoulder, and he sits there and suffers with the full weight of her sprawled across his legs, fingers in her hair and his mouth to her temple, thinking. Foggy texts an SOS at about nine-thirty ( _JESUS! FUCKING! CHRIST! I’M DEAD!_ ) to let them know the status of the witpro, and she leaves the phone on her knees after replying. ( _You’re very loud and exclamation point-y, for a dead guy; what happened?_ ) When her phone rings, though, loud and trilling, they both jump. “ _This is Jen, pick up your phone, please. This is Jen, pick up your phone—_ ”

“Don’t run off on me,” she says to Matt, and then slides off him to go put on actual clothing. She leaves the phone on speaker. “Hello?”

“Hey.” Jen sounds pleased. She’s not entirely sure what there is to be pleased about this early on a Saturday morning, especially when you’re coming off the heels of a mass shooting, but Jen is pleased. “So Angie asked me to tell you she heard from your c-client.”

“My client?” It takes her a minute. “Oh, Jen, you’re actually a beautiful human being.”

“Is something wrong?” Jen says. “You sound like you’ve been crying.”

“No, nothing’s wrong, just—some asshole at the gym hit a bag into my face, my nose is all swollen and it’s making my voice sound funny.” She sniffs, and makes a mental note to blow the clotted blood out of her nose before leaving the apartment. “I asked Angie yesterday but she couldn’t give me a name, how did you find her?”

“Angie tracked down her old c-counsel.” Papers shuffle. “Her name’s—shit.”

“You okay?”

“Knocked something over. Have a pen?”

Half into one of her button-down shirts, Darcy snags a sharpie off of the bedside table, and uncaps it with her teeth. “Go.”

“Her name is Marisol Guerra; she’s a pianist with one of the local orchestras.” Jen reads off the phone number. Darcy scribbles it on the inside of her arm, just below the tattoo of chains. “You’re free after noon, right? Because I told her she could go to the office around then, if she wanted to meet you t-today. She seemed interested. Said she’d call if she couldn’t make it today.”

Darcy spits out the lid, recaps the pen. “I owe you, Jen, so much right now, holy shit—”

“You sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine.” Would it be creepy if she called Marisol Guerra first? Probably. The woman probably doesn’t know that Darcy even has her number. Still, she’s tempted. “I owe you, seriously.”

“I’ll collect someday,” says Jen, lightly. “Though that’s difficult considering I b-barely see you anymore.”

“You’re the one who wanted me to be busier.”

Something clatters in the living room. Darcy stops, and looks around. The door’s halfway shut, and she can’t see Matt through the gap. Jen says something about Darla, but it’s faded a little, buzzing. “—misses you.”

“Darla hates me,” says Darcy, slowly. “Um, Jen, can I call you back?”

“Something wrong?”

“No, just—I have a walk-in. I’ll call you back.”

She hangs up before Jen can say anything else.

Matt’s stood up. She’d shout at him for it, if not for the look on his face. There’s an incredibly odd angle to his mouth, like he’s just been stung by a wasp. When she opens the door, and says, “Matt?” he tips his head to the side and says nothing. His eyes are flicking back and forth, like he’s looking for something. “You hear something?”

The water glass slips through his fingers. Darcy looks at it, and then at Matt, and she starts to say, _see, I told you, if you can’t even hold a glass properly then it’s not like you can fight_ , but then she sees the look on Matt’s face and she stops dead. She’s never seen Matt look like that, before, not really. All the blood’s left his face. When he shifts, he steps on one of the pieces of broken glass.

“Matt, Jesus Christ—”

“I can’t hear anything,” he says, scraping. Blood smears on the floor. “I can’t—I can’t hear anything. I can’t hear—”

 _Oh, God._ “Matt,” she says again, but he doesn’t react. “ _Matt,_ get off the glass—”

“I can’t hear.” He gropes, wildly, looking for something, anything. “I can’t—Darcy, I can’t hear you, I can’t hear, I can’t, I don’t know—”

Darcy crashes into him. In the same moment, his knees give out. He’s shaking, actually trembling, and when he wraps his arms around her and holds on he’s squeezing so hard that her ribs scream. “I can’t hear,” he says, and then again, louder, a shout, “I can’t hear anything, I can’t hear, I can’t _hear you—_ ”

“It’s okay.” She puts her hands to his face. He’s hyperventilating, his hands are shaking, and he reaches out blindly, touching her cheek, her hair. He knocks right into one of the bruises. Darcy doesn’t flinch. He scuffs around until he finds her mouth, her split lip. “Matt, it’s okay, I’m right here. Breathe, please—”

He heaves. She thinks he might throw up. “I can’t tell what you’re saying, I don’t know, I can’t hear anything, I can’t _hear_ anything, I don’t—”

Darcy catches his hand, his wrist, draws his fingers away from her mouth. She presses his palm to her heart, and covers the back of his hand with hers. It takes him a second. _Heartbeats,_ she thinks. He keeps track of the world through heartbeats, through breathing. She holds his hand there, over her heart. “I’m right here,” she says again. His fingers shake against her sternum. “Matt, it’s okay. I’m right here.”

He must feel it, she thinks. The buzz of her voice. The vibrations in her chest, in her ribs. He shakes when she speaks, and lifts his other hand to her throat, settling with his hand wrapped around her neck, skin to skin with her trachea, her vocal cords. When he shifts on the floor, glass crunches. His fingers are trembling over her sternum. She hooks her nails into his hair, draws him down so she can put her mouth to his cheek, his ear. “I’m right here,” she says again. “Matt, it’s okay, I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere, all right? Just—”

“I can’t hear you, Darcy. I don’t know what you’re saying, I don’t—”

“You’re okay.” She touches her fingertips to his mouth, to his cheek, leaves her hand there. It’s an anchor, she thinks. Probably for her. “Just—breathe, sweetheart. I’m right here, I’m not going anywhere, all right? I’m right here.” She breathes, in and out, more to steady herself than anything, and Matt nearly gags. “I’m right here, okay, we’re going to fix it, it’s—we’ll fix it. We’ll fix it, just—I’m right here. I’m right here. Breathe, in and out.”

He can’t hear her. She keeps babbling. It’s easier to pretend she’s not crying, if she talks.

It’s probably a good two hours later when she hears the scraping from the roof access door. Darcy’s sprawled sideways across Matt’s legs, her head resting against his shoulder, holding on as best she can when they’re settled on the floor like a couple of kindergartners in time-out. He stopped shaking about forty minutes ago, she thinks. Stopped trying to talk. He’s been sitting, quite still, caught up in silence. When the scrape comes again, he tips his head a little, and says, “Is someone there?”

“Can you hear me?”

His nose wrinkles again. Still, he sags, and when he puts his head on her shoulder Darcy shifts and leans back into him. “You’re echoing,” he says, the way someone who can’t hear themselves speak would say, louder than normal, half-yelling, more to feel it than to hear it. “From—from very far away.”

“Thank God.” Darcy swallows. “Thank God. You scared the shit out of me, Matt, Jesus Christ.”

She doesn’t say _I told you so._ There’s no point. Matt curls his fingers back into her hair, and says nothing. He doesn’t let go. “I think it’s Kate,” he says, after a moment, more quietly this time. “It smells like Kate.”

“You are correct, sir,” says the figure in the doorway, and then Kate slams the roof access door behind her. She’s in booty shorts and a white tank top that reads _I’m With Reckless_ with a purple arrow plastered across her boobs, which, how the hell she managed to parkour over here without scraping the hell out of her arms and legs Darcy has no idea. Still, she looks a little more tanned than she did before, and incredibly pleased with herself. “Looks like you two had fun,” she says, and bounces down the stairs two at a time. “So much for me rolling in three hours late with Starbucks.”

Darcy shuts her eyes. When Matt lifts his head, turns to not-look at Kate, she hides in his throat. “Really not funny right now.”

“Probably not, but it makes me feel better.” Kate tips her head. “You wanna tell me why Karen called me at like…seven in the morning saying I had to get my ass back down here to watch your butts? Because usually I can leave for a week without the whole city imploding.”

“Yeah, well, usually when you leave for a week we don’t get nutjobs treating local hospitals like carnival shooting galleries.”

Kate looks at the broken glass, and then at Matt and Darcy still tangled on the floor. Her eyebrows snap together. “Everything okay?”

“Fine,” Matt says. In the same moment, Darcy says, “Not particularly.”

“So, our brand of normal,” Kate says, and snags the broom and the dustpan out from between the fridge and the wall. “Get out of the way, I don’t need either of you like…dying of tetanus or something. The apartment gets wrecked enough as it is with your regular shenanigans.”

“Shut up, Kate,” says Darcy, and Kate smirks at her before settling in to scrape up the glass. Darcy glances down at the floor, at the smear of blood on the wood, and drops her voice. “Can you get up, do you think?”

Matt doesn’t say anything. He shifts his hands on her hips. Darcy clambers off him, and when she offers both hands, he catches them. His balance is shit, she thinks. His balance is shit, and when he’s vertical he still looks like he’s going to throw up, but he sticks it. He can pretend with the best of them, anyway, even if she can see through it most of the time. “I’m good.”

“Bullshit,” she says, and leaves her hand laced into his. “How was Albany?”

“Albany was shit,” says Kate. “How was the city?”

“The city’s been stupid.”

“Clearly.” She dumps the broken glass into the dustbin. “Twitter’s been blowing up. Shootings in hospitals and Ben all over the place and Lilith not responding to any tweets—seriously, can you like…just leave a winky face online or something? You know how much it freaks them out when you ignore them like this.”

“I don’t owe the Twitterverse my time or attention ever,” Darcy says. “Especially not right now.”

“They like a chatty superhero.”

“I’m not a superhero.”

“This shit again.” Kate eyes the bruises, the phone in Darcy’s free hand, and drops a wet washcloth onto the floor where the glass was, swiping it back and forth with the toe of her tennis shoe. To pick up glass shards, Darcy thinks. She’s not doing much more than smearing the water around, but the only big piece left is the one stuck in Matt’s foot. “Doesn’t look like this _unnamed shooter_ took a liking to either of you.”

( _Bang._ )

“He didn’t.” Matt squeezes her fingers, and then balances on the back of the couch. When he pulls the piece of glass from his foot, Darcy looks away. “Darcy, you need to go.”

“What? No.”

“Jen said that the client was going to be at the office at noon. It’s past eleven.”

She shakes her head. “If you think I’m going anywhere right now—”

“If you cancel on her the first time out, she’s going to look for another firm.”

“That’s—”

“True,” Matt says. Kate takes the glass from him, and throws it into the garbage can too. “You know it’s true. If she’s a paying client, we can’t fumble it.”

“I’m not _leaving_ , Matt, not when—”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“I don’t—”

“Darcy.”

 _In and out, Lewis,_ she thinks, again. _In and out._

“Fine.” Darcy twists her hair up at the back of her head and snaps a second band around it, making a sloppy bun. “Fine. Kate, are you free today?”

“For the most part. I don’t have classes, and I was going to have a coffee date but I can cancel if I have to. What’s up?”

“I need you to watch him,” Darcy says. She doesn’t bother lowering her voice. It’s not like Matt wouldn’t be able to hear her anyway. “He hit his head, he has a concussion, he might have a TBI, he—just keep an eye on him. And if something happens, call Claire.”

“Not you?”

“Claire first.” _Sorry, Claire._ If Claire’s on shift, then she won’t be able to come and help, but she might at least be able to give some suggestions. Or tell them to get Matt to the hospital, in which case she’s willing to risk all the questions that’ll come from the scars and the bruises to make sure he doesn’t die. “Claire first and then me, if you need to. Okay?”

Kate cracks her gum between her teeth, and adjusts her glasses on her hair. “Does that mean I get to tie him up if he argues with me?”

“You can try,” Matt says, lightly, and doesn’t look at either of them. His shoulders are still stiff as a railroad spike. “Promise you I’ll make it fun.”

“Don’t be snippy, Aramis,” says Kate. She glances at Darcy. “I’m making coffee. You want any?”

“To go, yeah.”

Kate brushes by her into the kitchen, and starts whistling. It’s enough of a cue. Darcy creeps close, as close as she can manage without settling on the couch again, and knocks into his knees. She thinks he might yank away from her, but when she reaches out, Matt catches her hand and holds on. Darcy tugs her fingers into the hair at the back of his head, as light as she can. “You’re okay?”

“I’m okay.”

“You’re sure?”

“No,” says Matt. He shuts his eyes. “I need to get the helmet repaired.”

“I can do that.”

“You have to meet with the client.”

“I’ll take it with me.”

His mouth twists. “You can’t carry that in your messenger bag.”

“Then I’ll come back and get it and go and see Melvin later.” She tips his chin up. “Seriously. Sit here. Stay with Kate. I’ll be gone for a few hours. Don’t make me chase after you, okay? If anything happens, call Claire.” She puts her lips to the top of his head. “I can’t lose you, Matt. I really—I really can’t lose you. You need to promise me you’re not going to do anything reckless.”

He’s quiet. Slowly, he folds his fingers around her wrist, draws her hand down so he can press his mouth to the scar on her palm. “Since when do I do anything reckless?”

“That isn’t funny,” she says, in a very damp voice. “And that’s not a promise.”

“I promise I won’t go anywhere alone.”

“And that you’re not leaving this apartment until I get back.”

“Darcy—”

“ _Promise me._ ”

His lashes flicker. Then he says, “I promise.”

Darcy shuts her eyes. She breathes. “Okay.” When she leans over, he tugs her down by the chain of her necklace and brushes his lips over hers. “Okay.”

“You should probably put cover-up on those shiners,” Kate says. “Just, you know, just saying.”

Darcy glances up at her. Kate’s still messing with the coffee pot, going back and forth between the beans and the grinder and the machine. “Is it that bad?”

“It’s been worse,” says Kate, which isn’t an answer at all. Though it kind of is. “Still. Like…your whole face needs replacing pronto.”

“Fine.”  

“Leave the mask,” Matt says. “And your suit. At least until you’re done.”

“I’m going to meet with Marisol, and then maybe Foggy, and then I’m coming back.” She smooths her thumb over his cheek. “No detours unless they’re unexpected.”

That, at least, isn’t a lie. Something loosens in his hands. “Okay.”

“If you try to go anywhere, this is me officially giving Kate permission to shoot you with one of her tranquilizer arrows.”

“Not helpful.”

“Extraordinarily helpful.” Darcy turns away. “Soon as I get my shit together, Katie, he’s all yours. For the next three hours, at least.”

“Cool,” says Kate. “You wanna watch _Brooklyn Nine-Nine_ with me? Or listen, you know. There’s a lot of talking, you’re good with the talking. Or you could help me with pre-law stuff! You know things about legal shit, or I assume you do, considering you never shut up about truth and justice. Maybe you can help me write the essay I have due in a week.”

“Actually,” Matt says, “shoot me now.”

The heat hasn’t broken. If anything, it’s worse. She can only pray that the cover-up holds, she thinks, as she takes the stairs up to the second floor. The door to Nelson, Murdock, and Lewis is still firmly shut, the lights inside off (which, thank Christ, the last thing they need right now is leaving the lights on when they’re already deep in the red) but when she opens the door she sends a few pieces of paper flying across the wood. Notes, she thinks, from people who came by. It’s posted on their website that occasionally there will be days when no one’s at the office, and she’d put a notepad on the wall next to the front door so people could leave messages when they had to (some of their clients don’t have phones; it works better than having them sit and wait) but even on a heavy day, this is a bit ridiculous. Six separate messages. One of them from Miss Jacinto, all in Spanish. She leaves it on Matt’s desk (he might be blind, but Jacinto wrote it in pen, and he can trace out letters when they’re sculpted out as clear as this), and flicks through the rest, hitting the replay button on their old-as-fuck answering machine. Different messages from clients, a few new inquiries. The only one of note is from Malcolm, of all people. (“We heard about what happened from that sergeant you guys know, so like…Jess is doing that thing she does where she wants to ask if you’re okay and thinks it’s like…childish or something, so this is me officially asking. …bye.”) She goes through them all, perched in Karen’s desk chair with the fan blowing in her face, and then she tosses the papers aside, and goes to clear a spot on her whiteboard of crazy. New case, she reasons, new acronyms.

She has one earbud in and her bare foot braced to the tiny fan Karen has set up under her desk when there’s a knock at the door. Marisol Guerra is young, for a concert pianist. Maybe Darcy’s age, maybe a little bit older. Whippy and dark-skinned. She’s wearing half-a-dozen thin bracelets around her wrist, silver inlaid with turquoise, and they click together when she offers her hand. “Sorry I’m late,” she says, and Darcy blinks and looks up at the clock. It’s 12:05. “It’s difficult to find parking.”

“You drove?”

Marisol shifts her purse on her shoulder. “I’m new to the city. I used to live in Arizona. Brought my car with me when I moved.”

“Ah.” Darcy considers. Tall, she thinks. Maybe Matt’s height, or she would be if she weren’t wearing heeled boots that added an extra few inches. There are bruises on her knees like she’s landed hard on a floor, but she’s also sharply gorgeous, with long lashes and clear cheekbones and lipstick that is hella on point, holy shit. “Come in and sit down.”

The conference room is coolest. Still, Darcy herds Marisol into her and Matt’s office, because she has to deal with the notes anyway, and if Marisol’s meeting takes less than an hour she can at least call around and make sure nobody’s dying before she goes back to the apartment. Marisol glances at the wall, where Kate had framed the article from Fisk’s crash-and-burn. _NELSON, MURDOCK, AND LEWIS._ “Does the city always get this hot in the summertime?”

“Not for as long as I’ve been here.” Darcy thunks down into her chair. “Never been to Arizona. Never been further west than Georgia, actually. Is it nice there?”

“Empty,” Marisol says, and Darcy laughs. “Like—really, really empty. There are a lot of ranches and big stretches of desert.”

“Gross.”

“Not as bad as it sounds.” She folds her fingers over the straps of her purse, her eyes riveted to Darcy’s face. “I heard from the woman at the Supreme Court that you might be busy, but—are you the only one in today?”

“Had a thing this morning,” Darcy says shortly, and shuts the notes away into the top right-hand drawer of her desk. “My partners are working other cases. You can ask about what happened to my nose, instead of staring at it, if you want. I won’t be offended.”

Marisol blinks again. “I didn’t want to impose.”

“I box, sometimes,” Darcy says. “I was at practice last night and some jackhole clocked me in the face with a punching bag. It’s not the first time. I’m not all that good at paying attention to where I am in space, is all. How can I help you, Miss Guerra?”

“Marisol’s fine.”

“Marisol, then.” She turns her hand so Marisol can’t make out the notes on her forearm. “Jen Walters said something about it being a racial discrimination suit.”

Marisol purses her lips. “More a complaint, really, but I don’t—it’s not something I want to happen to anyone else. And I’ve asked around, and the guy’s done it before, it seems like, so just—I wanted to look into what I could do. The last person I talked to said, you know, there wasn’t much.”

“Who was that?”

“Um, a guy named Lawrence Cranston? I have his number if—”

“I know Lawrence Cranston,” says Darcy, and leans back in her chair. “I had the distinct pleasure of being in Trusts and Estates with him during law school.”

“Oh,” says Marisol. She hooks her hair behind her ear. “I see.”

Darcy eyes Marisol for a moment. “Does he still do that thing where he sucks his teeth when he doesn’t know how to answer a question?”

Marisol blinks at her, and then snorts. “Is that what that means? I thought he was just hissing because I didn’t actually have a case.”

“Not when I knew him, it wasn’t.” Lawrence had always been more pissy with Matt than with her or Foggy, just because Matt had talked rings around him in a mock trial in another one of their classes, but he’d never been particularly friendly. _Should I feel bad about poaching one of his clients? Probably. But I don’t._ Welcome to Columbia: packed to the gills with straight white cishet doucheheads. “You fired him?”

“He wasn’t being particularly helpful.”

Could be good, could be bad. If they don’t get her an answer, then Marisol Guerra could fire them, too, which would be shit for their image right now. Still. “Well, here’s hoping we can do more.”

Marisol puts her purse on the floor. She twists one of her bracelets around her wrist without looking at it, over and over, smoothing her thumb over the porous blue stone. “I said I was from Arizona,” she says. The rhythm of her voice makes Darcy think of Spanish, of Elena but not quite, very faint but still curling underneath the words. “I grew up on the Tohono O’odham reservation out there, near Tucson. My mother was half-Mexican. To some people I guess that means I’m a quarter illegal, and three-quarters of something that makes them very uncomfortable.”

Darcy twirls her pen between her fingers. “Jen said you’re a concert pianist.”

“I’m part of the Chamber Orchestra of New York. I trade off with a few other pianists. I play violin, too, and cello, but I prefer piano.” Her nails are trimmed short, and unpainted. Darcy makes a note on her page ( _Chamber Orchestra_ ) and falls silent. “A month ago one of the other musicians, a cellist, gave me an extra ticket to a university concert, a string quartet.”

“Which university?”

“Manhattan School of Music. Kalia’s new in the Chamber Orchestra, she graduated from MSM a few years ago. One of her old classmates was part of the quartet.”

“Full name?”

“Kalia Blake.” She watches Darcy write it down. “Kalia ended up getting sick that day, and said I should go on my own. I hadn’t met her friend at all, so I felt kind of weird about it, but I’d heard good things about one or two of the other players, and they were expecting someone from the Chamber to show up. So I had two tickets, general admission, and I was ten minutes early, but when I made it to the theatre, the bouncer wouldn’t let me in.”

Darcy clicks her pen a few times. “You get the guy’s name?”

“Yeah, Marcus Caldwell.” Marisol rubs at her nose with her thumb. “He wouldn’t give me a straight reason for why he wasn’t letting me in. Kinda shifted me over to the side, you know? And kept his voice down. He said something about the venue being full, at first, and then when I told him I could see empty seats inside he mentioned fire codes or whatever, and then he tried to say something was wrong with my ticket—both of them—and just—” She shrugs. “He kept saying something like _you’re disturbing the guests, miss, you need to leave_. Threatened to call security on me.”

“Sounds like a charmer.”

Marisol snorts again. “You have no idea.”

“You mind if I’m blunt?” Darcy says.

“Go ahead.”

She throws her pen onto the table. “What makes you think it was racial, and not sexual or—anything else?”

“Other than the fact that I was the only woman there who didn’t look like they came out of a bottle of Elmer’s Glue?” Marisol’s eyes flick over Darcy’s skin, fix on her hair. “I told Kalia about it the next morning. When she called around and asked, she heard some story about this guy throwing out students of color, for, you know. Being noisy when they weren’t, really, or just…existing. There are a lot of study abroad students at MSM, but the demographics aren’t particularly varied. I looked up the statistics, maybe—out of a thousand or so students, two percent are black or African-American, maybe three percent Latino-Chicano.” She gestures at herself. “So.”

“He’s done this before?”

“So far as I can tell. I looked into it a little. I don’t have a lot of names, just he-said-she-said, but he’s worked at the university for a while. Security, usually, but they double him out as an usher sometimes when there are bigger events or there’s some big name coming to a concert. He’s not a student, he’s a professional guard. Some professor’s brother’s son-in-law or something, I don’t know.”

“They usually are.” She wishes, suddenly, that she’d stolen some gum from Kate. She really wants to crack something in between her teeth right now. ( _Bang,_ he’d said, and Lilith won’t settle back down. _Bang._ ) “Off the top of my head there are two main options. If you were to hire us, then we’re going to want to file a racial discrimination claim with the feds, under the Civil Rights Act, most likely against the university."

"The university?"

"He's working for them, if they're letting him get away with it then we can nail them on that." She sighs. "It’s illegal for someone to be excluded or removed from any place of exhibition or entertainment, such as a concert, on a racial basis, so unless you did something you haven’t told me about, say, drink too much champagne and start dancing on a table, I feel like there’s some kind of claim here.”

“I don’t like champagne,” Marisol says.

Darcy shrugs. “Regardless. If and when we file, we can either go the easier route, through New York law—specifically the laws to do with civil rights—which is prove that there was no legitimate reason for you to be denied entry, and make them pay for it—it wouldn’t be much, I don’t think, less than a thousand, but—”

“The money doesn’t matter.”

“Right. There’s that, then. Or we could do the same thing, but under 40-c instead of 40-b, we’d need to prove racial bias. Which unless we can somehow record this guy talking shit about you, it’s gonna be kind of difficult.”

“That’s what Lawrence said.” She rubs at her nose again. “He said it would be a lot of work for possibly no reward.”

“Well, not possibly. We can probably get some injunctive relief—um, that means making the courts get this bastard to quit being a bastard, or get the school to make him quit being a bastard or whatever they decide to do—and if we use 40-b instead of 40-c then at least you can get up to five hundred dollars.” Darcy snags her pen again, and starts tapping it against her notebook. “The question is if you want to. Racial discrimination suits are tricky, and I wouldn’t blame you for not wanting to get involved.”

“I wouldn’t be looking around for another lawyer if I didn’t want to get involved.” Marisol drops her hands to her lap. She folds her fingers together, and says, “Do you think you can do it?”

Her phone buzzes. Foggy. _Could use you at the station tbh, this is getting sticky._ She knocks it into her desk drawer, and pushes the thing closed. “I can definitely do it, Marisol, I’ve done these before. Doing it isn’t the problem.” She’d been worrying that this was some kind of employment problem. Title II won’t involve nearly so much of a migraine, unless Marcus Caldwell decides to be a supreme asshat and fight tooth and nail. _Think about your luck, Darcy. That’s probably gonna happen._ Ah, well. “We just might be opening a can of worms if I do, that’s all I’m saying. Lawrence Cranston might be kind of a dumbass, but he wasn’t wrong when he said it could get complicated. If you hire us, it’s our job to advise you, and my advice right now is to think about whether you want to get involved in a suit that could last a while.”

Marisol’s quiet. Darcy watches her, for a minute. _Seriously, what the hell lipstick brand is that and where can I get some?_ It’s gorgeous, and probably way out of her price range if Marisol’s a concert pianist working for the fucking Chamber Orchestra, holy shit. Her hoop earring resettles against her throat when she says, “I talked to a student a few days ago. She said her grandmother had been thrown out of her senior recital because she showed up in a burqa.”

“Caldwell?”

“Yeah.”

Darcy lifts her eyebrows at Marisol, and ignores the sting from one of the scabs. “Want me to walk you through rates?”

“I don’t care how much it costs,” says Marisol. “I want this guy to turn around and figure out that all his bullshit has finally come back to bite him in the ass.”

“That,” says Darcy, “is precisely what I wanted to hear.”

.

.

.

She’s walked a grand total of a block away from the office when Ben falls into step with her.

“Ah,” Darcy says. “Why did I not expect this? You’re like a bee to honey.”

“Long time no see, Lewis,” he says. “You look like shit.”

“I don’t need your snark right now, Urich.” She whacks him with her elbow to let him know it’s a joke. She hasn’t seen Ben in weeks, not since before the heatwave and before—wait, no. Not since St. Patrick’s Day. Holy shit, that’s months, not weeks, and when did she stop paying attention to how frequently she ran into Ben Urich?

Well, no, that’s not quite true. Ben and Lilith talk sometimes. Darcy eyes him through the hair hanging against her cheeks. The thing about deciding to become a vigilante while also working with a damn good reporter? That reporter winds up about 99.5% sure that you are, in fact, said vigilante, and occasionally hits you up for information that you shouldn’t be able to give him. Especially on public thoroughfares where you can’t run away without attracting a lot of attention. He’s never once dropped a hint to anyone else that he knows, though, which she owes him for forever and a day. He knows, and he hasn’t said a word. Whether or not he knows about Matt and Daredevil, she’s not quite as sure of, but she thinks he might at least suspect that Matt has _something_ to do with it, if only because he keeps getting his ass kicked. Just…the blind thing makes it hard for a lot of people without the appropriate knowledge of the situation to put it together.

 _Into the fray, Lewis._ She pastes on her cheerful face. “How’s Doris? She doing okay in the heat?”

“Doris is fine. Doris is pissed that none of you aside from Karen have turned up for dinner in the past six months or so, but Doris is fine. Doing better. Why do you look like shit?”

“Can’t turn off that reporter nose, can you?”

“It’s a curse.” Ben pushes his glasses up his nose. She’d thought, since he left the _Bulletin_ , that he’d chill a little with the jackets with the elbow patches and the button-downs and the shiny shoes, but it might actually be his uniform. The collar of his shirt is soaked with sweat, though, so he must be suffering like the rest of them. At least _he_ can roll his sleeves up without showing off all the cuts and scabs from rolling around on asphalt in the middle of August. “How is it that no matter whatever the hell happens in this neighborhood, the four of you always manage to find yourself front and center?”

“It’s a curse,” she repeats. “Though I really don’t know what you’re talking about this time.”

“Really? Because I spent most of the night wandering around Metro-General Hospital, and there was a very chatty nurse who wanted to let me know that a blonde woman and her dark-haired sister-in-law were in the room with Steve Schaeffer when the guy with the shotgun started emptying cartridges into the wall.” Ben glances over his shoulder. “Not to mention that the dark one did the _supremely_ reckless thing of trying to get the shooter’s attention so other people could get away.”

“Well, that was fucking stupid of her,” says Darcy.

“I talked to Karen this morning.”

“Then you already know the whole story.”

Ben makes a grumpy little old-man noise in the back of his throat, and then seizes her by the elbow to pull her into the shade cast by an awning, off the main part of the sidewalk. “Do me a favor, here, Lewis, and cut the shit. How the hell did Grotto wind up with you?”

Darcy doesn’t shake his hand off. She doesn’t have to, really; she’s not a big fan of getting yanked into shadowy corners, but it’s not like Ben’s going to attack her. When a white guy passing them on the street slows down, looks from her to Ben and back again, she flips him off. “He’s my uncle, you racist jackass. Fuck off.”

The jackass fucks off. Ben looks back at her. “Not your grandfather?”

“I’m twenty-six, Ben. You’re sixty-two. So unless your sproglets were having sproglets at the tender age of probably-way-too-young, then no, you’re not my grandfather.” She pulls her elbow out of his grip. “Client privilege. I’m not talking to you about Grotto.”

“Yeah, well, tell that to the District Attorney. Reyes is playing hardball on this one. If you don’t watch out, you’re gonna get your nose bloody.” His eyes drop to her nose. “Again.”

“Like it’s the first time. What have you heard?”

“Pay to play, Miss Lewis. You tell me something, I tell you something.”

“You do realize my sister works for the District Attorney. I could just ask her.”

“Jennifer Walters is the most straight-laced ADA I’ve seen in twenty years,” says Ben. “You’d have better luck getting a python to spit out the goat it just swallowed.”

“I’ll tell her you said that, see if she invites you around for baklava anymore.”

“Lewis.”

“I told you, Ben, I can’t.” There’s _another_ white dude giving them odd looks, and Jesus Christ, she has had it up to here with racist douchefucks today. With racist douchefucks who look like army veterans and have a buzzcut to match. ( _Bang._ ) “Fuck _off_ ,” she snaps, and the guy skitters, turning his back real goddamn fast. When she looks around at Ben, his eyebrows are roosting near his hairline.

“Bad night?”

“You have no fucking clue,” Darcy says.

“Everything okay?”

“Don’t want to talk about it.” Sweat drips into her eyes. “Goddammit, I hate this goddamn weather.”

He fumbles with his pocket for a minute, and then produces a somewhat tattered, yellowy handkerchief. Ben holds it out like a peace offering, and Darcy wipes her face. It smells a little like chili oil. “Lewis, seriously. You look like you want to bite someone’s head off and chew up the bones.”

“If anyone else gets up in my face today, then I might.” She folds the handkerchief up. “Client privilege, Ben. I can’t tell you what’s going on with Grotto. It’s non-negotiable.”

“Get me in a room with him.”

“Not gonna happen.”

“What _can_ you tell me, then?”

“Other than the sky is blue?”

“For God’s sake, Lewis, work with me here.” Ben pushes his glasses up his nose. When she offers him the handkerchief again, he waves it off. “The DA is pissed as shit. What went down with the Kitchen Irish last night, it’s not the first time something like that’s happened. The Dogs of Hell, half the Mexican cartels in the city are running scared, people have been dropping like flies the past three weeks—”

“I know this.”

“You _don’t_.” He darts a look down the street again. “Where’s Karen?”

“With Foggy.”

“And Murdock?”

She has to swallow before she says, “Sick day. Why does Cersei Lannister have a wasp up her ass?”

Ben scuffs his fingers together like he’s rubbing a coin. “Back-and-forth.”

“Jesus, no wonder the VA tried to sue you after you published that tell-all, you’re kind of a bastard when you get the bit between your teeth.”

“Like you’re any better,” Ben says, and Darcy snorts. It hurts like hell—her nose can’t handle snorting, not at the moment—but she laughs, and looks up at the torn inside of the awning, at the sunlight gleaming through the cracks. “The DA’s office has been buzzing like a hornet’s nest. They’ve done a good job keeping the shootings quiet, they don’t want a citywide panic, but this is the fourth major attack on gang holdings in less than a month. Weapons are military grade. Every crime scene I’ve been to looks like a bomb site. No survivors, no mercy.”

( _Bang,_ he’d said, and he’d had dark eyes, very cold, not the same darkness as Wilson Fisk, not the same gravitational pull, but something rawer, the burning kind of frost that will peel your skin off the bone, the black ice that sends a car skidding off the road—)

( _Bang,_ and Matt drops—)

( _I’m going to kill you._ )

“I picked up on the no mercy piece,” she says. She has to think about it, consciously think about it, to keep Lilith from creeping out. “Kind of hard not to.”

“What happened?”

“What do you think happened?” She pulls out her phone, and texts Kate. _Status update?_ “Wait, fourth? I know about what happened to the Kitchen Irish and about the Los Milagros guys down in the Meatpacking District—”

“Sometimes I think I’d kill for your sources,” says Ben sourly. “The cops only found that crime scene three hours ago.”

Darcy cocks her eyebrows at him. “You don’t want my sources, trust me. I heard about those two, and I’m guessing that the third one has something to do with the Dogs of Hell, but what was the fourth?”

Ben does his coin-rubbing thing again, and says, “Fifteen minutes with Grotto.”

“Really, really not gonna happen, Ben.”

“Then I guess you’re out of luck.”

Her phone buzzes. _He’s doing that thing where he says he’s meditating but I think he’s actually snoring. What about you?_ “Why don’t you tweet Lilith or Daredevil? I’m sure they’ll talk to you. Light up the Batsignal if you have to, Bruce Wayne will probably show up.”

“Why should I? I have Catwoman right here.”

“That’s hilarious.” She swipes out _Ben’s being nosy_ and then puts her phone back into her pocket. “I met Daredevil back when he was the Devil, okay? And that’s because I was stupid enough to get involved in something that managed to put me in Fisk’s way. I’m not a magical vigilante magnet.”

“Sometimes you talk, and all I hear is a bunch of bullshit.”

They’ve gone from a manageable disaster to a complete wreck of a universe and it’s been less than twenty-four hours. Darcy goes to pinch her nose, and then remembers. “Look, let’s just say that I could get you in touch with Grotto. What do you want to talk to him about, the psycho with the shotgun? Because trust me, there’s not a lot to be said on that front that hasn’t already been said. The guy’s crazy.”

“Seems to me that a lot of people have been saying Daredevil and Lilith are crazy, too.”

“Yeah, well, they don’t shoot up bars full of gangsters," says Darcy shortly. “This one does.”

“You have me there.”

She shifts her bag on her shoulder. “I can’t get you into a room with Grotto, Ben. I can’t pull off miracles, especially not where the DA is concerned.”

“Give me something that hasn’t been in the news yet, then,” Ben says, and Darcy glares at the underside of the awning again. _Jesus._ “Give me something that nobody has. You were there, you saw it. From the looks of things, you had your ass kicked.”

“I keep telling you, I’m not—”

“Just answer the question,” says Ben, and Darcy shuts up. “Who are these guys, Lewis?”

( _Bang._ )

“Hypothetically,” Darcy says. “You know, hypothetically, saying I was there—which means none of this is quote-worthy, Ben, absolutely none of it. Clear?”

“Clear.”

“Okay.” Darcy sighs. “It’s _a_ guy. Not—not a whole troop, one guy. The hospital was taken down by one guy. Lilith—” she glares at Ben again “—and Daredevil were—were taken down by one guy.”

Ben stares hard at her face. Then: “Jesus Christ, you serious?”

“Yeah, I’m dead serious. Hypothetically.”

“Hypothetically.” He rubs a hand across his jaw. “Jesus Christ. I’d heard rumors, but I figured it was boogeyman stuff, the kind of shit you get when you have a lot of people running scared. Didn’t think it was actually true.”

Darcy folds her arms close across her chest. “So far as I know, they’re not wrong.”

“Jesus _Christ_ ,” he says again. “You get a good look at him?”

“I mean, yeah.” Darcy fights the urge to press her hand over her ribs, over the mark from Jarhead’s boot. “Um, tall. He was military. Walked like it. Buzz cut, good with guns. Took control of the whole floor without firing off more than a few rounds.”

Ben shakes his head. “Already knew that.”

“We’re not talking basic grunt, Ben, he was—he was trained, he knew shit that _Catwoman_ —” she scowls at him “—hasn’t ever seen before. He’s been trained, not just in hand-to-hand. Knew his way around a sniper rifle. And he was fast, really—really damn fast. Someone gets in his way, and he doesn’t hesitate.”

( _Bang._ )

“Way I heard it, he does,” says Ben. “Loads of people in that hospital he could have killed, including you. And yet here you stand. Little bruised, sure, but at least you’re breathing. Kitchen Irish didn’t get the same courtesy.”

“Yeah, well, the Kitchen Irish were his targets.” She yanks her hair ties out, and threads her fingers into her hair, pushing her bangs back up out of her face. “I just happened to be there. _Hypothetically_.”

“Sure.” He pushes his glasses up his nose. “You talk to him?”

“Does it count as talking if the guy fires a shotgun at you afterwards?”

“Hey.” Ben catches her by the arm again. “What happened?”

“Seems like you already have it figured out.”

“Lewis.”

Darcy pulls away from him, and says, “I don’t want to talk about it, Ben.”

His lips thin out. Thankfully, though—and she’s pretty sure no one other than Ben would have done this, no one she knows—he actually listens. “You gonna be looking into him from your end?”

“Why does everyone assume I have an end? I don’t have an end. I am infinite.”

“Lewis.”

“If I did, Ben, would I tell you?”

“Sometimes I look at the four of you and think, _aw, you cocky little shits._ ” Ben rolls his eyes. “Fine. How about this. From now on, whatever you pick up about this guy, whatever you hear, you come to me first. The blog gets the exclusive. Don’t tweet it, don’t natter about it, just send it right to me. In return, I tell you everything I know, soon as I know it.”

“Karen’s probably gonna do that anyway.”

“Karen is going to charge into it like a bull at a red flag.” He takes off his glasses, and wipes them dry. The humidity is actually making them fog up. “But she’s not on the front lines like you are. It’s not the same thing.”

“I’m not on the front lines.”

“Then why’s Murdock taking a sick day?”

“Heatstroke,” says Darcy. “He keeps wearing those goddamn suits.”

Ben looks at her for a long time, and then says, “That’s plausible.” He sounds a little put out about it.

“You know he loves his suits.” She puts her hands on her hips. “Is that enough, or should we start dancing the tango in the middle of the sidewalk and scandalize literally everyone here?”

“You want to know about the first hit? Then make the deal.”

“Jesus, why am I surrounded by so many stubborn men?” Darcy rolls her eyes hard enough to hurt, and then offers him her arm, and says, “Fine. Deal. Walk with me, Hildy, and tell me all.”

“Are you calling me Hildy Johnson?”

“Should I not call you Hildy Johnson? Hildy Johnson is a queen.”

“Far be it from me to argue with that one.” Ben gives her arm a quizzical look. When Darcy scoffs, and loops her hand through his elbow, he actually looks pleased. He coughs and turns away to hide it, but she did not miss the little glint of _oh_ behind the glasses. “So. Last night, Kitchen Irish. One of the Kitchen Irish gangs, anyway, there are still half a dozen scrambling to get enough firepower together to fight these guys. …this guy. Brannigans might be down, but the O’Reardons are gearing up for war.”

“So the first hit was another one of the Kitchen Irish gangs?”

“Slow down, Selina.” He pats at the back of her hand. “Last night, Kitchen Irish and the Los Milagros. At least what’s left of Los Milagros; a lot of them jumped ship after hearing what happened to the Dogs of Hell. Hit out on the highway, killed four guys hauling illegal cargo.”

( _Bang._ )

“That’s what you called to talk to Karen about,” Darcy says. Ben nods.

“It’s never a good sign when the Dogs get snappy. They don’t scare too easy, and if they’re yanking at the leash, then it means bad things for everyone underneath them.”

 _And Foggy walked right into it._ Her skin creeps. God, they came so fucking close last night, so, so close, and that’s never going to happen again. Not if she can help it. “Plus the weather.”

“Yeah, well, the weather isn’t doing anyone any favors.” Ben wipes his forehead with the back of his hand. “That was last week. Two weeks before that, there was another hit. Not in the Kitchen, down by the waterfront. Cops called it a busted gas line. But your guy blew up a warehouse, Lewis. They pulled fifteen bodies out of the building. They’re still identifying them, but the cops are pretty sure they’re all O’Shaughnessy Irish mooks.”

Her stomach rolls. She’s pretty sure she’s going to be sick. Darcy wraps her hand tight around Ben’s wrist, over the watch, and swallows over and over. “Jesus Christ. How have I not heard about that?”

“Like I said, DA’s doing their damnedest to keep this shit quiet, and I can’t blame them, not after what happened with the Russians last year.” He shakes his head. “My mole in the DA’s office won’t talk about it, shuts up like a clam when I ask him too many questions.”  

“Yeah, well, he could get cited, so I don’t blame him.” _Fifteen men._ Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ. “I need to get back to work. Where are you gonna go?”

Her phone buzzes again. Foggy. _Seriously, where are you???_

“15th.” Ben eyes the screen of her phone. “That one’s new.”

“Yeah, well, the one I had last year didn’t survive.” And she has a second one, a small, cheap one, shoved into the bottom of her purse along with the gun she stole from Turk Barrett, months ago, but that’s neither here nor there. The knife she took from Jarhead is sticky against the small of her back. Darcy taps out _where do I meet you?_ with her thumb, and hits send. “I mean. Not a lot you can do these days without a phone.”

“Not exactly, no.” He puts on a casual face. “You going to meet Karen?”

“Cool your jets, Yoda, I’ll tell her to call you.”

 _Criminal court for the witpro,_ Foggy says _. Ask Angie, we might have moved by the time you get here._  

“Your guy at the DA,” Darcy says, when they stop at the corner so Ben can hail a taxi. “What _has_ he told you? Before, you know, his clam-mouth sets in.”

“Only that they’re calling this guy the Punisher.” Ben pinches his lower lip between two fingers. “And the names of the people working the case.”

“Oh?”

“You’re not gonna like it.”

A stone drops into her stomach. _Shit._ “What am I not gonna like?”

“Lewis.”

“Just fucking tell me, Ben, Jesus.”

Ben peers at her from underneath his eyebrows as he says, “You might want to seriously consider figuring out how to get the python to spit up the goat.”


	3. Snowball's Chance In Hell

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: I mean, some violence and blood ( _Daredevil_ ) and a lot of emotional arguments/talks. I can't really think of anything else?
> 
> I'm playing a little bit with the concept of conflict of interest. For those who don't know, this means like...lawyers can't represent someone who is related to them because of emotional bias, so having Jen on one side of the table and Darcy on the other could get complicated. Jen isn't prosecuting Grotto, but it's...generally odd. I googled a lot and couldn't find anything that said they _couldn't_ , but at the same time, you know. There's that.
> 
> I'm somewhat frustrated with how fast the first four episodes move, because my god, I would really have preferred to build up to some of this stuff rather than having to slam into it like a runaway bus. (/has written chapter four) Seriously, like...I like building from 10 to 90, not dropping in at 90 and winding my way back down. _Jesus._
> 
> Song for this chapter: Lykke Li, "No Rest For The Wicked." 
> 
> Unbeta'd.
> 
> I still have time before school starts again, so let's see how long I can keep up this "every three days" thing.

She can’t afford a taxi. It’s a pain in the ass, but she can’t, not after last night. So it’s after cramming herself into yet another overheated subway car and trying her hardest not to snap the elbow of some kid trying to goose the butt of every woman in a five foot radius that she finally puts her bag through the security check at the Criminal Court building at 100 Centre, and snags the first guard she recognizes. “Travis, is Angie at her desk?”

“Yeah, she’s at her desk,” he says, and then looks up from his computer. His eyes nearly burst out of his head. “Jesus, Lewis, what—”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I mean—hey, slow down!”

“I’m the Roadrunner,” Darcy says, and grabs her messenger bag before it’s even all the way out of the machine. On the other side of the gates, Lisa makes an irritated sound. (“Watch it, Lewis, this thing is expensive!”) “Sorry, Travis, I don’t have time to explain—”

“ _You’re bleeding_!” Travis calls after her, but she’s already bolted. And yeah, unfortunately, she is bleeding. The tape that Foggy stuck over the cut on her forehead hasn’t kept the scab from cracking, and it’s dripped onto the collar of her white button-down. She fumbles Ben’s handkerchief out of her pocket and presses it to her forehead as she darts up the stairs (fucking heels, _fucking heels_ ), coming to a very sudden stop in front of Angie’s desk. Hei Hei is in today, and there’s a huge bald patch on his shoulder that looks like an accident with an electric razor. No cone, though. _Can monkeys take surgical cones off? They do have opposable thumbs._ He chitters a little at the sight of Darcy, and curls his tail around the back of Angie’s neck. She’s still not sure how Angie gets away with bringing her tamarin to work, but she’s fairly sure it has to do with the contract she signed with the devil. Her soul in exchange for supreme power over the New York justice system and its rules of employment.

“I’m looking for Foggy,” Darcy says, and then backtracks. “Wait, no. I’m looking for Jen. I need to talk to Jen like right now.”

“Call her.” Angie doesn’t look up from her paperwork. “The toucan’s not in court right now, she’ll probably pick up.”

“Angie, seriously, I can’t just stand around and wait for her to check her messages, I just—please tell me where she is.”

Angie lifts her head, and stops. “Jesus Christ,” Angie says, and actually gets up out of her chair. “Peregrine, what the hell happened to you?”

Darcy shies away from Angie’s outstretched hand. It’s not that she thinks Angie’s going to hit her, not exactly. It’s that Angie moves fast, and the options she has right now are either move out of the way or grab Angie’s wrist and slam it to the desktop, and the second one is completely out of line. _Rein it in, Lewis, come on_. (It’s been hours and she’s still coasting right on the edge and she can’t seem to make herself _stop_ , goddammit, she’s better than this, but every time she shuts her eyes she just sees it, over and over, _bang_ and the drop—) “I’m fine,” she says, through her swollen lip. “Just—boxing accident. It’s not a big deal, it’ll heal.”

Angie hisses through her teeth. “Jesus Christ, Darcy.”

“I think that’s the first time you’ve said my name.”

Angie gives her a very long, very level look before sinking back down into her chair. “You went to the hospital and had your head checked?”

“ _Yes._ ” Claire had shone a light in her eyes in the alleyway, pronounced that she had a mild concussion, and said, essentially, _if you’re gonna be stupid enough to wander around, at least try not to get into a fight._ “I’m okay. Jen, Angie. Where’s Jen?”

“I figured you’d be in that meeting, isn’t it with your firm? Pigeon’s been here for an hour.”

“Foggy hates it when you call him pigeon.” She peels the handkerchief away from her head, looks at it, and then settles it over the cut again. _Gonna have to buy Ben a new hanky, pretty sure._ By the time she’s done with it, it’ll probably be more sweat and blood than cloth. “Which room are they in, Reyes’s? A judge’s chambers?”

“No, pretty sure they’re holed up in Tower’s office. Are you sure you’re not going to fall down and die in front of Empress Cixi? Because that’d look really bad on paper.”

“I’m _fine,_ why does no one believe me when I say I’m fine?”

“Because it looks like someone took a baseball bat to your nose.”

That’s pleasant. “I promise you I am not going to fall down and die in front of Samantha Reyes, District Attorney.” She makes an X over her heart, and refuses to think about Matt. ( _Bang._ ) “Tower’s office still in the same place, or has he moved up in the world?”

“Nah, same place. Where’s the robin?”

“Matt has heatstroke.”

Angie snorts. “Figures. You sure you don’t want an aspirin?”

“Careful with all the concern, Angie, or I’ll start to think you like me.”

Blake Tower’s office is kind of tucked away amidst all the other ADA offices, closer to the center than anything, like a spider in the center of a spiraling web. He’s not a city kid, she doesn’t think. She doesn’t know a lot about Blake Tower, truth be told, only little tidbits she gets from Jen and gossip from other defense attorneys. Went to Harvard Law, took the New York bar, went into the DA’s office rather than federal legal hoohah for reasons unknown to all and sundry. Definitely not a Fisk supporter, she thinks, looking at the shadows beyond the glass. Both he and Reyes might be grasping politicos, but neither of them were stupid enough or skeezy enough to get into bed with Wilson Fisk and Vanessa Marianna. Only Senator Cherryh had been quite that stupid.

_And he’s now on house arrest with a federal contingent up his ass, so that’s where that put him._

No, Blake Tower’s not a bad guy, she doesn’t think, and judging by the number of people he’s put away over the past six and a half years, he’s very good at his job. Still, he keeps his head down. It’s good for dealing with Reyes, especially when she has a mission in mind, but it’s really bad for letting anyone get closer than arm’s length. Add Reyes into the mix—Fordham Law and in your face with all the Ivy boys who have ever tried to make her feel like shit about it, clawing her way up from the ignominious lower-class neighborhoods in Amsterdam, New York, pushing further and further and further until she finally hit the DA’s Office and sunk her nails in with every scrap of strength and cunning she has in her—and it’s a recipe for disaster in the making.

_Welp._

Karen’s the one to answer when she knocks. “Sorry I’m late,” Darcy says, or starts to say, but Karen takes one look at her face, shuts the door behind her, and pulls Darcy into a hug that actually physically stings. “Ow—ow, hi, ow—”

“You idiot,” Karen says, in a brittle little voice. “You _idiot_.”

“Ow, Karen, _ow—_ ”

“You’re okay?”

Karen’s shaking, Darcy realizes. She stops complaining. When one of the other ADAs comes to the door of his office to watch them, she flips him off behind Karen’s back. “I’m okay. Everything’s okay. Are you doing all right?”

“Getting shot at was not the best ending to my Friday,” Karen says, but she doesn’t let go. “You need to not do that again. Not ever.”

“What, get shot at or get whacked in the face with a bag?”

Karen makes a little hiccupping noise that could be a laugh. “You know what I’m talking about.”

She thinks of it, the raised shotgun, the flash of Karen and Grotto at the end of the hall and Jarhead taking aim. _Hey_! Yeah, she knows exactly what Karen’s talking about. She pets at Karen’s hair, a little awkwardly considering she’s in flats and Karen’s in heels and that means she’s bent kind of halfway over trying to hold her upright. Which, okay, she really must have scared the shit out of Karen if Karen’s doing this in the middle of the Criminal Court ADA office block, even if it isn’t all that busy in here right now.

“I’m okay, Karen,” Darcy says, quietly, and Karen pulls back. “You’re okay?”

“I’m fine.”  Karen takes a breath, and stares hard at the fluorescent lighting until she can blink the damp off her eyelashes. “You look like shit.”

“Ben said the same thing.” Karen hasn’t slept, she doesn’t think, and there’s a bit of a trembling to her hands when she wipes her palms on the fabric of her skirt. Darcy doesn’t mention it. “What’s been going on in there?”

“Um, a lot. Foggy and Reyes and Tower have been going over the witpro agreement, it—it seems pretty legit, so far as we can tell. If we can get Grotto to draw out a dealer named Edgar Brass, he goes into witness protection courtesy of the federal government, and maybe people can stop shooting at me.” Karen glances over Darcy’s shoulder, and her lips go thin. “Um, Foggy told me about Matt.”

“Heatstroke’s a bitch,” Darcy says. “He’s staying home today. Unless the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse show up, which I am not ruling out at this point.”

“Okay.” She bites her lip. “We should probably—”

“Go in, yeah,” says Darcy, and knocks the door open with her hip. “Apologies for being late. Things have been complicated today.”

Samantha Reyes looks up from her paperwork, and scowls. Or, not scowl, exactly—her mouth gets that funny twist that Kate’s gets sometimes when she has a plan and not everything goes according to her carefully prescribed conditions. On her far side, Tower gives Darcy a considering look, and then inclines his head once before going back to his files. Jen isn’t in the room, but there _is_ an empty seat with an open folder in front of it, covered in her handwriting. _Ah, shit._ Foggy doesn’t get up, or look at her for more than a second, but when Karen shifts to take the third empty chair, sticking Darcy in the middle, he kicks her in the ankle and leaves his foot there, like he’s trying to keep her from moving. “Your tardiness isn’t my problem, Miss Lewis,” says Reyes. “If I had to put a name to it, it’s only a minor annoyance.”

Darcy bites her tongue. _Sassing the District Attorney is probably not the best idea right now, Lewis._ “I’m here now,” she says. “Can someone bring me up to speed?”

“Is it entirely wise that your partner be a part of this process, Mr. Nelson?” Reyes folds her hands on the desk. “When the fact of the matter is having her in this room at all could be a conflict of interest. Considering the circumstances.”

“If that’s the case,” says Foggy, “then maybe you ought to ask ADA Walters to leave as well. You know. Considering the circumstances.”

Holy shit. Karen taps the back of Darcy’s wrist with her fingernails, and flashes the screen of her phone under the table. _They’ve been like this for hours._

Darcy takes the phone, and taps out, _I’ll bet_ without looking at the screen. Then she adds a bunch of question marks, and passes it back. A second later, Karen flashes the phone again.

_Jen v. not happy w/this._

Yeah, Jen wouldn’t be. Darcy looks up from the phone, and hitches her mouth into a smile, or as best a facsimile as she can manage, cutting into the pissing contest. “I think that ADA Walters and I will be able to keep ourselves from applying any particular bias to Grotto’s case.” _Stop there, Darcy,_ she thinks, but her temper’s snarling, she’s _dying_ for a fight, and Reyes is giving her one and what the hell, she can’t stop herself. _Foggy’s gonna kill me_. “Considering I’m fairly certain that Jen isn’t actually working on Grotto’s case at all, but the Punisher files, instead, which means she basically has no interest in this to conflict _with_. Which also begs the question of what she’s even doing in this room. But, you know, if it makes you uncomfortable, I would be more than happy to step back.” She pauses. “Ma’am.”

“How did you—?” Reyes stops, staring hard at Darcy’s face. “Mr. Nelson?”

“Wasn’t me. I’ve been with you since about eleven this morning.”

“And it wasn’t Jen, before you go there,” Darcy says. “If you honestly think Jen Walters would discuss confidential case files with someone outside of the DA’s office, then, no offense, Miss Reyes, but I’m gonna have to ask what kind of orange juice you drink in the morning.”

Foggy kicks her hard in the ankle. Darcy bites her tongue, and keeps on smiling.

“Watch yourself, Miss Lewis,” says Reyes. “Your firm’s already hanging on by its fingernails. If you’re not careful, all the goodwill your partner’s established with this office in the past few hours is going to go right back down the garbage chute.”

“Which would be the last thing I want, believe me.” She leans back in her chair. “You might want to keep an eye on some of your clerks. If they’d dropped that name with anyone other than me, then it probably would be in the papers by now, and I’d say that’s the last thing you want, considering all the other vigilantes splashed over the evening news.” _Sorry, Ben’s secret source._ She’s pretty sure that whoever Ben’s been talking to, it’s not a clerk of court, though, so all that’s gonna happen is that some people will have the shit scared out of them. Which…she still feels bad about, but. Whatever.

“He’s not a vigilante,” Tower says abruptly. Light catches around the frames of his glasses. “The kind of things he’s done? The guy’s a psychopath.”

“Because psychopaths can’t be vigilantes,” says Foggy, and steps so hard on her foot that tears actually spring to her eyes. “Didn’t you hear about that guy who cut up a bunch of mutants a few months ago? People are saying he was dressed up in a red suit and carried katanas.”

Tower actually winces. Reyes looks like she’s bit into a ghost chili. Under the table, Karen digs her nails into Darcy’s arm. She thinks, for a minute, that it might actually turn into a fight. Then the door opens again, and Jen says, “They’re prepping the area now. We should be able to—oh.”

Jen stares at Darcy. Darcy stares right back. “Hey,” she says. “Twice in two days. Coincidence, huh?”

Jen’s eyes dart to Reyes, and then to Tower, before she sinks very slowly into the last empty chair. “C-Coincidence is one word for it.”

“These are the terms that the DA is willing to broker,” says Tower. Reyes fists her hands up, and hides them under the table. “Like we discussed at the station, Mr. Grote—”

“Grote?”

“Elliot Grote,” Reyes says. “Your client, Miss Lewis.”

“Grotto’s kind of laconic,” Darcy says. “Didn’t mention his name to me before we pulled him bleeding out of a bar, you know. Sometimes it happens.”

Foggy shuts his eyes for a long moment, and pushes down onto her foot. Karen looks caught on the verge of hysterics. Jen’s lips are twitching; she ducks her head, and hides behind her hair. Darcy’s pretty sure she’s the only one to see Tower dart a little look at Reyes, like he’s waiting for the woman to blow her top. Reyes’s mouth has thinned so much that it’s basically disappeared.

“Mr. Grote’s only available option is to cooperate with the District Attorney’s Office and set up a meet with Edgar Brass.” Reyes shifts a curl of blonde hair behind her ear. “Brass is one of the few remaining members of the Kitchen Irish Brannigans to still be in the city after the attack last night, and so far we’ve been able to connect him with four separate murders, within the heroin trade and without. If Grote can get him to roll on audio, then he is free and clear to take his witness protection agreement and use or misuse it as he likes, outside of my jurisdiction. As detailed in the proposed agreement.”

Foggy pushes the file over to her, and starts to talk again. Darcy tunes out. Tower, she thinks, is watching them. In particular, he’s watching Karen, which considering the fact that Karen is technically their legal assistant/soon-to-be paralegal (if she can afford to go back and finish her classes), and not one of the partners, makes sense. Still, she’s not all that jazzed about it. She scans over the papers, and then goes over them again, as quickly as she can without missing things. All detailed exactly as Reyes said; get Brass to mention heroin on tape and he’s in the clear. It seems, she thinks, fairly open and shut, which is probably why there’s something slimy creeping down the back of her neck. _Why Brass and not Jarhead?_ Though really, using Grotto to try and lure Jarhead out of hiding would be a plan that only a literal _crazy person_ would come up with, considering the guy’s tendency for maximum casualties.

_Loads of people in that hospital he could have killed, including you, from the sound of it. And yet here you stand._

( _Bang,_ and Matt falls—)

“Why a midnight deadline?” she says, and Foggy shuts up again. Reyes turns, slowly, and Jesus Christ, is she imagining the _Exorcist_ vibes in the room right now? Because she’s not sure she is.

“Because we’re working against the clock on this one, Miss Lewis,” she says. “It’s more than possible that Brass is next on this bastard’s list. If Grote doesn’t get him to fess up to at least one of his many charges before midnight, then this office has no interest in continuing to offer him a protection deal. Especially considering his own track record.”

Yeah. Okay. Valid. Darcy shuts up, and applies herself to the witpro agreement. She doesn’t trust Reyes and Tower to not at least try and slip one or two loopholes into the legalese to worm their way out of responsibility if anything goes wrong.

Foggy manages to hold his tongue until they’re out of the Criminal Courts building, at least. They’re just passing a coffee cart on the corner when he finally makes a noise like a bomb’s gone off inside his ribs, and punches her in the shoulder. (The shoulder she’d dug a pellet out of this morning, which, _ow._ ) “ _What the fuck_!” he says, in a very high pitched voice, and punches her again, _Christ,_ Nelson— “Darcy, were you _trying_ to poke the sleeping dragon in the eyeball? I know you haven’t slept in like three days but seriously—”

“Ow, Foggy, be gentle—”

“ _Are you crazy_?” He reaches out, and then drops his hands again, like he thought about shaking her and then reconsidered. “I know you and Matt are like—doing whatever it is you’re doing now, but he has rubbed off on you _way_ too much if you think holding a steak out over shark-infested waters is going to do anything other than make our lives harder—”

“She tried to kick me out of the room and then implied Jen was being unethical, Foggy, I can’t be pissed off about that?”

“I thought she was going to scratch your eyes out, Darcy, Jesus! We can’t afford to get the DA pissed at us on top of everything!”

“Yeah, well, she didn’t seem too fond of you, either, _Mr. Nelson,_ what did you do?”

“Foggy was amazing,” says Karen, and Foggy turns bright pink, right there in the middle of Centre Street. “He completely wrecked her and her little goon when they tried to bulldoze their way into the 15th, it was spectacular.”

“I caught her off guard,” Foggy says, and turns away to mess with his bag before anyone other than Darcy notices how red he’s getting. “I was doing my job and protecting our client, not actively baiting the District Attorney, there’s a difference—”

“I lost my temper, okay? I’m sorry.” She really needs to stop trying to pinch her nose; it hurts like a motherfucker. Darcy touches her fingers to the scab on her temple—holding, still, somehow—and then nudges Foggy. “It worked out okay. I won’t do it again.”

Foggy makes a _pbbbt_ sound. “At least I can trust you to try a good fifty percent of the time, unlike someone else that we _will not name_ , Darcy. Seriously, Jesus Christ.”

“Yeah, well, call me Old Reliable, I don’t know.” Darcy turns, and looks back at the doors of the courthouse. She thinks she might see Jen at the glass doors, talking with one of the guards. “You really want to see me get lectured, Foggy? Stick around. Jen’s gonna have a ball.”

“Did you know?” Karen says. “That she was working on the Punisher files?”

“No, I didn’t. Did you?”

“Nope,” says Karen. “But, I mean, I’m just her roommate, you’re her cousin. Sister. Cousin?”

“Sister,” Darcy says. “But it’s Jen. She takes work as seriously as other people take, you know, breathing. Or Pop-Tarts. You didn’t see anything in her files?”

“She doesn’t bring sensitive stuff back to the apartment.” Karen goes to bite her thumbnail. Without thinking about it, Darcy catches her wrist and draws her hand away from her mouth. Karen doesn’t notice. “I thought she was going to have a heart attack when she came into the conference room and saw the pair of us sitting there, I’ve never seen anyone go so pale so fast.”

“You think she’ll lecture me too?” Foggy looks a bit grey. He’s heard Jen give lectures before. If anyone lives up to Hogwarts’ motto of _never poke a sleeping dragon in the eye_ , it’s Jen Walters, not Samantha Reyes. A roused Jen is a Jen that does not stop, or slow down, or give in until you feel like you’re made entirely of glass. And not just broken glass, either; glass that’s been smashed so fine that it’s basically dust. “I didn’t do anything this time.”

“You’re probably safe.” And here comes Jen, marching, her hair falling out of the ponytail to tickle her face. “Ah, shit. You guys should bolt while you can.”

“Meet you back at the office,” Foggy says, and disappears. She’d say he teleported, if she couldn’t see the tail of his jacket whipping around the corner. Karen waits for a few seconds longer, wavering, but eventually she picks the smart option, and follows. Darcy hooks her thumbs into the pockets of her slacks, wishing she could at least have had a chance to change her shirt. There’s still a bright red speck of blood on her collar.

“Hey, Jen,” Darcy says. “Don’t be snippy.”

“Snippy implies that I’m being irrational, which I am _not._ ” It’s the _Don’t you dare play with me, Darcy Lewis_ voice. Which, not as bad as she was expecting. It could have been the _I am going to fucking kill you_ voice. “When were you g-going to tell me that you knew about the files?”

“I only learned about them an hour ago, Jen, and Grotto was a thing that happened at like…ten last night, I didn’t think it was going to involve you so fast. Or, you know, at all.”

Jen can’t argue with that. She waves it off. “What the hell happened to your face?”

“Like I keep telling people, it was an accident at Fogwell’s, okay?”

“Cut the bullshit.” She yanks Darcy’s jacket from the crook of her elbow. “You’re beat to shit all the time, now. Bruises everywhere, cuts—if it w-weren’t Matthew you were seeing I’d be actually concerned that someone was making a game out of hurting you every night—”

Her heart crashes into her sternum. _Fuck._ This is not a topic she wants Jen to stay on, and she refuses to think about how much of a hypocrite that makes her, she absolutely refuses— “What does this have to do with the Punisher?”

“ _Don’t say that name out here._ ” Jen snaps out the jacket, and folds it. “Jesus Christ, Darcy, how the hell did you g-get involved with someone like Elliot Grote?”

“Didn’t Reyes mention it to you?”

“ _Jesus_.” Jen starts to pace, back and forth. “You need to—Darcy, you four, you shouldn’t be getting involved in this. This is _bad_ , what this guy is doing, this is the w-worst stuff I’ve seen come through the office since—since ever, since I started. You can’t get involved in this, you’ve already been sh-shot at once if the stories I’m hearing are right—”

“So you’re saying I should have done nothing and let the—” Jesus, _the Punisher,_ what a stupid fucking name “—that I should have let that asshole try to kill Karen and Grotto back in that hospital?”

“You _were_ there!”

“Jen, please don’t yell, not on the sidewalk—”

“I will yell whenever and wherever I need to in order to get you to listen to me!” Jen shakes her head so hard that her glasses actually slip down her nose. “You know what happened the last time I told you to d-drop a case and you didn’t? You were put in the hospital! You had to go into _hiding_! Fisk tried to have you killed, for God’s sake—”

 _Fucking hell._ For a second, all Darcy can hear is a faint buzz. “Jen, I never said—”

“You come back with a handprint around your throat and start waking up screaming and you think I’m stupid enough to not realize what nearly happened?” Jen clenches her hands up into fists, trembling by her sides. “For G-God’s sake, will you just listen to me this time and let this _be_?”

“Grotto’s my client, Jen, I can’t just turn my back on him!”

“And I’m your sister and I am—” God, Jen’s _crying_. There are tears on her cheeks, catching over her skin. “I am _begging_ you, Darcy, please let this go, please—please get as far away from this case as you can—”

“I can’t do that.” Shit. _Shit._ She made Jen cry. She made Jen cry, and she can’t keep having a day like this, she can’t, she can’t _handle_ a day like this when she’s already so raw and close to the surface and on the verge of snapping into pieces. She can’t do this. “Jenny, I can’t, I can’t _do_ that, I can’t back off and leave Grotto to get killed, I can’t—that puts Foggy and Karen and Matt in danger, you _know_ that, I can’t just let them face this alone—”

“And _I can’t lose you_ ,” Jen says, and _shit._ “Darcy, I can’t—please don’t do this, please don’t chase this, I can’t—I c-can’t go through what happened last year, not again, p-please—”

( _Bang._ )

( _Please don’t leave me, Matt_ —)

She can taste salt on her lips. When did she cross the canyon? When did Jen wind up in the position Darcy used to be? When did Darcy end up burying herself in secrets? “If it’s so dangerous, then—then you need to get away from it, too, tell Reyes to shove it up her ass, stop looking into this, Jen, get as far away from it as fast as you can—”

“This is my _job,_ Darcy.”

“And this is mine!” She snatches her jacket back. She’s crying too, now, all of a sudden, and it feels like blood on her cheeks. _This is the worst fucking day._ “This—Elliot Grote came to us, Jen, he came to us because he had _faith_ in us, he had faith that we could help him, and I’ll be damned if I abandon him now. Even if it puts me into the path of a psycho, _again_ , because for God’s sake, this is what we’re supposed to be doing, remember? We’re supposed to be helping people, not turning our backs on them when they actually need someone to save them.”

“Grote is a career criminal who’d sell you out as soon as he had a better offer!”

“So’s Reyes! She rips defense attorneys apart like confetti, she’s thrown her own office under the bus a million times, and you think she’s trustworthy?”

“She’s trying to put this guy behind b-bars—”

“Yeah, because she’s probably banked everything she has on putting him away! She’s aiming for a politician’s chair, Jen, not trying to do the right thing, we can’t let her steamroll us—”

Jen screams, caught between her teeth. Color flares high in her face, under the smeared mascara. “Darcy, _let this go_.”

“I _can’t_ let it go, not any more than you can—”

“I am not going to watch you die because you’re too goddamn stubborn—”

“Jen—”

“No!” Jen reaches out, and grips Darcy by the shoulder, shaking her. “Darcy, _no._ Please, please, I’m begging you, _p-please_ stay away from this. Please. _Please._ ”

 _So close to the edge._ Dancing on a wire. Lilith under her tongue. “Jen,” she says. “I _can’t._ ”

Jen lets out a small, choked sound. For a second, Darcy thinks she’s going to turn around and stalk off, turn her back and walk away, because it’s what Darcy would do in an argument like this one, leave the stalemate lying there between them like a thrown glove. Jen, though—Jen steps forward and wraps her arms around Darcy so tightly that it’s like she’s being snapped in half. She smells like chamomile tea and her shampoo and the insides of the criminal court, paper and glossy photos and ink, and Darcy yips when it crushes her ribs into her lungs and pinches at her bruises. Jen doesn’t let go. “God damn you.” Her voice cracks. “God damn you for being so goddamn stubborn, Darcy Lewis.”

“Learned it from you,” Darcy says. Jen makes the little noise again, and squeezes so hard that Darcy actually leaves the ground. “Ow.”

“Shut _up_.” Jen breathes out hard, half a sob. “Just—I hate you right now.”

“I hate you too.” Darcy winds her arms tight around Jen’s ribs. “Please be careful.”

“I don’t need your hypocritical _b-bullshit_ right now.”

First Matt—well, implicatively—then Foggy, and now Jen. She just has to get Karen and Kate to call her a hypocrite too and she’ll have the quintet of everything crushing her into tiny pieces. _They’re not wrong,_ says a tiny voice in the back of her head. It’s half her mother, half her, and she can’t shake it off. _They’re definitely not wrong._ “If it were me asking you to back off,” Darcy says, into Jen’s shoulder, “you’d be telling me no, too.”

Jen doesn’t have anything to say to that. She’s been going to the gym, Jen—there are muscles in her arms that weren’t there before, a strength Darcy can’t remember from six or even three months ago. She wonders if Jen’s been taking self-defense classes. Then, very, very carefully, she deposits Darcy on the ground again, and wipes at her eyes. “God damn you,” she says again. “Just—god _damn_ you.” 

“I’ll try to stay out of his way.” Darcy fumbles Ben’s handkerchief out of her pocket, and gives it to Jen. Jen looks at the blood smeared on the cloth, her eyes hard, and then blows her nose into it. “I’m—I’m not exactly looking to get a shotgun aimed at me all over again.”

That was the wrong thing to say, apparently, because Jen actually flinches. Darcy hugs her again, lighter this time, ignoring the heat and the stickiness and the way the tears keep threading down her face (Which needs to stop, seriously, she hates crying, it doesn’t help her any, and underneath it is a curling, vicious rage, _he tried to kill Matt, you can’t forget what happened_ —) Jen smooths Darcy’s hair back and kisses the top of her head, so hard that it actually makes her brain pound. Then she yanks away.

“Go home,” she says. “Go—go home, don’t come out with Foggy tonight when they d-do the surveillance. Go home and fix your nose and just—stop, okay? Just be careful. G-go home, Darcy.”

Darcy doesn’t say anything. She squeezes Jen’s fingers, instead. If she speaks, she thinks, then all she’s going to wind up doing is telling Jen more lies.

.

.

.

She doesn’t go home.

She wants to. She really, really wants to. She wants to go home and sit and watch Matt breathe, even if he’s asleep, even if that’s creepy as hell and she’s still pissed as fuck she had to actually _shout_ him into sitting down, because this morning she’d thought he was dead and she never, ever wants to have to keep that in her head, what it had felt like to think he was dead and gone. She _never_ wants to feel that again, the emptiness of it, the hollowness, the black, screaming hole inside her where everything that she was used to be. _Was, or is, or pretend to be?_ It’s left gouges inside her the way a tiger claws at dead wood. So yeah, Darcy thinks, she sure as hell wants to go home, but in the end she’s only there for about twenty minutes before snagging the helmet off of the coffee table, kissing a sleepy Matt goodbye, and heading down to Battery Park.

Melvin’s garage has gone through some renovation, in the nearly nine months since Darcy first crept in here with Matt at her side. He’s knocked some walls in, spread out a little more, put in new worktables and new machines that she can’t even begin to understand the workings of. When she raps on the door to the garage, Betsy’s the one to rack the thing up. Her hijab is a soft plummy red today, and she’s wearing lipstick that makes her skin go curling dark. “Hello,” she says, and touches her fingertips very lightly to one of the bruises on Darcy’s face, all nurse and no thought. (The cover-up job, she thinks, has held, but Betsy’s very good at picking out bruises. She used to work at a battered women’s shelter.) “You look awful.”

“Believe it or not, you are not even the fifth person to tell me that today.” She’d been pulled aside on the subway again by a group of old ladies who’d pressed a 1-800 hotline for abuse victims into her hand. Darcy had thrown the slip of paper into the garbage can as soon as they were out of sight. _Nobody asks Matt if his girlfriend’s abusing him,_ and it’s a thought that she can’t shake _. Nobody asks Matt if he’s being turned into a punching bag._ She feels sick, because Christ, so many women in the world being brutalized by people that are supposed to love them and _she’s_ the one getting all this random concern. It’s bullshit. “How are things down here?”

“Quiet.” Betsy waits until Darcy’s ducked under the half-open garage door, and then pulls it back down again. “Doing better.”

“That’s good.” Darcy lifts her chin. “That one’s new.”

“He wanted to try something with silk layering, I think.” Betsy tugs at the hem of her hijab. “It’s cooler than I thought it would be. Means I won’t have to feel like a complete sweat-monster when I take it off.”

“That’s nice, at least.” Darcy hesitates, and then draws the helmet from her bag, still wrapped up in one of Matt’s T-shirts. She hadn’t wanted to risk someone kicking her bag over and knocking Daredevil’s mask out onto the floor of the subway car. “Um, I needed to talk to Melvin about fixing something, actually, is he here?”

“He’s upstairs futzing with the sink again, I’ll get him.”

Betsy opens a side-door, and heads up the stairs, shouting Melvin’s name. On the first floor, Darcy hears a grumbling mutter, and then a clang, and loud cursing. She’s pretty sure the sink just opened fire. Darcy settles on one of the three-legged stools, and kicks her heel against the wood, looking around. Melvin’s been working on new fabric designs, she thinks. There’s a uniform sketched out on one of the blackboards that she can’t remember seeing before, and on the table there’s a few more diagrams of what look like the interior of a walking stick. The whole basement smells like spray paint and molten glass. She tips the chair back, and thunks back against the ground. _Mask. Then…what?_ Watch Matt. Make sure he doesn’t sneak out or hurt himself, which really, she shouldn’t have to do, and sometimes she wishes he weren’t such a stubborn shit, because—

( _Bang._ )

_Stop thinking about it, Darcy._

“Lilith,” says Melvin, and steps down into the basement. She forgets sometimes that he’s just so fucking huge. He doesn’t have much of a presence, Melvin. Or if he does, he doesn’t show it with her, anyway. Darcy gets off the stool, and flares an A-OK sign at Betsy in the stairwell. “Where’s Mike?”

“Taking a sick day.” She unwraps the helmet, and offers it to him. “I was wondering if you could fix this.”

Melvin trips. Or not trip, but do that little rolling bouncy thing he does when he gets startled. He takes the helmet, shifting it delicately between his massive hands, like he’s holding a shard of ancient pottery. “Jesus. This from last night?”

In the stairwell, Betsy puts a hand on her hip. “Something bad happen?”

“Someone cracked off Mike’s helmet, is what happened.” Melvin sucks his teeth, and tips the helmet so he can look at the inside. “Christ. Inch or two to either side, would’ve shattered. Accident?”

“Um.” Darcy clears her throat. “I mean, no, direct headshot.”

“Know what caliber?”

“I’m not that good, Mel. Small enough for an ankle holster.”

“Jesus,” Melvin says, and hooks the helmet up to one of his little machines. Betsy wanders into the back room, and starts clattering around again, humming a Bollywood song under her breath. “This guy beat you up, too?”

“Do I really look that terrible?”

Betsy reemerges with an ice pack, and smacks it into her hand. “You’ve looked worse. The make-up’s holding, somehow.”  

Darcy folds the ice pack over the bridge of her nose as best she can without losing sight of Melvin, and winces. “That’s encouraging.”

“More the eyes than the nose, really,” Betsy says. “Usually you smile more. Or—not quite that. You usually don’t look quite so angry.”

That’s…not what she expected to hear. Darcy looks away. “Bad night.”

“I’ll say.” Melvin scrapes with his tweezers. “This thing’s busted. Don’t think I _can_ fix it. Need to make a new one.”

“How long will that take?”

“Three days easy.”

Matt is…not going to be happy about that part. She shoves that aside. “Not gonna ask you to rush it, but if you can do it faster, might help.”

“Told Betsy I wouldn’t be doing anything else illegal,” Melvin says.

“I think this is an exception, Mel,” says Betsy. She squeezes his shoulder, and eyes Darcy. “You told them you’d keep them safe, remember? They’d keep us safe and we’d keep them safe. So I think this is an exception, don’t you?”

It shouldn’t hurt, Darcy thinks, to see Melvin look at Betsy like that. She’s not entirely sure what they are, Melvin and Betsy; Melvin’s been going to therapy when he can afford it, but he’s still only crept forward from wherever he’d regressed in bits and pieces. He adores Betsy, though, and it shines through on his face every time he even says her name, and that shouldn’t hurt to see. She clenches one hand up by her side, and waits. Melvin looks back down at the helmet, forehead wrinkling. “Three days,” he says again. “Two if Betsy helps some.”

“I have a shift tonight, but tomorrow I can.” Betsy smacks a kiss onto Melvin’s bald head, and then straightens. “Mike doing okay? Lying down like he should be?”

Darcy just has to lift her eyebrows to answer _that_ question. Betsy scrunches her nose up. “Figures.”

“He’s predictable.”

“Two days is a long time to do nothing,” Melvin says. And yeah, for Matt, it definitely is. _And for you, too, Darcy, seriously._ As frustrating as it is to think. “Can try to do something about this. Can’t promise anything. Maybe weld the crack shut. Put in extra support. Want me to?”

That would just be like giving Matt a guy to beat up and then telling him he can’t, she thinks, but it’s a miracle he’s been down for the count for even six hours. “Yeah, please.”

“He shouldn’t be moving, if he took a shot like that,” Betsy says. “By all rights, he should be dead.”

“No,” Melvin says. “No, look. One inch to either side, half an inch maybe, yeah. This—” He taps the crack down the front of the Daredevil mask. “Deliberate. Aimed right for this spot. Knew it wouldn’t kill him, just knock him silly. Guy knew what he was doing. Aimed. Knew.”

Darcy shuts her eyes, and gropes for the edge of the table. One of her nails folds under the force she’s putting on the plastic. “He tried to kill him, Melvin.”

“No,” Melvin says. “Warning shot. Incapacitation. Guy killed a bunch of Kitchen Irish. Knows his way around a gun. Knows what he’s doing, knows what he wants. If he took a shot like this at Mike, then he hit exactly what he was aiming for.”

Incapacitate, she thinks. Incapacitate, not kill. It ought to drown the shadows weaving in her throat like ivy, but they don’t fade, not really. They echo, instead. _I want to kill him._

_If he wasn’t trying to kill Matt, then—_

_I want to kill him._

_Think, Lewis. If he wasn’t trying to kill Matt, if he was just trying to get him to back off—_

_Stay out of the way,_ he’d said, and he’d shot the floor at her feet, knocked her out, hadn’t killed her, but—

_I want to kill him._

She turns away from Melvin, and covers her mouth with her hand. She wants to gag. _Christ._ If he wasn’t trying to kill Matt, if he didn’t try to kill her, then she shouldn’t want to kill him, she shouldn’t _want that_ , she’s better than that, she knows she is, but—

_Bang._

Melvin stands, and shifts around. For a guy that’s so bulky and built, he can move like a weedy, asthmatic tween when he wants to. “Lilith?”

“I’m okay.” She presses her fingers to her lips, and swallows. There’s something tangy on her tongue that’s not quite bile, not quite blood. “I’m okay.”

Betsy puts a hand to her back, and leaves it there. Darcy gulps air, blinks until her eyes clear. She coughs.

“Sorry,” she says. “Long night.”

“I’m sure,” Betsy says, and looks at Melvin. Melvin shuts his mouth up again, sinking back down onto his stool. “He resting like he should?”     

“What do you think?” Darcy pats Melvin’s shoulder. “Before I forget—you guys don’t have a taser lying around here somewhere, do you? Only mine kinda…died. Like, explosively.”

“No,” says Melvin. “Illegal in New York. Don’t have them.”

Shit. She has the knife, though. That’ll have to do, for now. “Thanks.”

“Wait,” Melvin says, and bounces back to his feet. “Don’t have anything finished, nothing you’d like, not sparky enough—”

“Sparky?”

“But.” He snaps open a cabinet, and digs through old boxes. “Mike says you like whacking people with sticks. Use this until we get something.”

It’s a black baton, like a nightstick that an English bobby might use. There’s a strap for her wrist, which, thank God, she’s not entirely sure she wouldn’t drop the thing if it wasn’t looped to her. “Compressed air for the extension,” Melvin says, and hits a button on the handle. The thing snaps out to a good three feet long. When he hits the button again, it collapses back down. “Not, you know, your style. In your face, up close. Too much Mike, not really Lilith. But. Can’t go out with no weapon.”

“I have a knife.” And a gun, but she doesn’t use those in uniform. “I should be okay.”

“Knife’s not really Lilith, either.” Melvin offers it to her. “Careful. Heavy.”

Darcy loops the strap around her wrist, and spins the baton a few times. It _is_ heavy, but not unmanageably, especially considering she’s been training to heave her own body weight up onto rooftops for the past year. She hasn’t done much work with sticks, beyond basic things Matt had insisted on, but she cannot deny, she’s used planks like baseball bats a time or two. She’s pretty sure the general idea isn’t much different. “I’ll try to get it back to you in one piece.”

“Shouldn’t break.” Melvin raps his knuckles against the material. “Reinforced.”

“You hit someone in the head with that, you could kill them,” Betsy says. “Be careful, Lilith.”

She twirls the baton again, and hits the extension button. There’s no real kickback, but the thing snaps out like a bullet train, and if she hit thef button while it was pressed up against someone’s side, Jesus. She could bust a lung. “I’ll try.”

“When you come back, we can build something,” Melvin says. “For you. Things are happening in the Kitchen. Can’t go out without a weapon, not right now.”

“What have you heard?”

“Friends are scared.” Melvin darts a look at Betsy. “People are dying. You gonna be okay?”

The baton makes a whistling sound as she whips it down, pointing it towards the floor. Betsy doesn’t flinch. Melvin does. Darcy punches the button again, retracting it, and wraps it up in the T-shirt she’d brought Matt’s helmet in, slipping it into her bag. Then she frowns. “Melvin, you know what kind of knife this is?”

She’d cleaned the blood off it before she’d tucked it into the waistband of her pants. Still, the way Melvin handles the thing, you’d think it was dripping red. “Drop point,” he says after a moment. “Combat blade. Kinda common. Not hard to find.” He flips it, catches it by the hilt. “Marine.”

“Marine?”

“See?” He rubs his thumb over the base of the blade. There are two letters faintly etched into the metal, so subtle Darcy hadn’t seen them. “SF.”

“San Francisco?” She cocks her head. “Steve Franco?”

“Semper Fi,” he says. “Marine Corps.”

Darcy takes the knife back, and slips it into the sheath. “You think whoever dropped this is a Marine?”

“Hard to say. Lots of civvies with throwaway knives. Lots of shops selling old Marine blades, knockoffs. Could be someone just picked up a knife, happened to have that on it. Might not be. Hard to say.” Melvin frets a little. “You gonna be okay? Lilith.”

“Yeah,” Darcy says. She doesn’t stop to think about it. It’s what Melvin needs to hear, really. “Yeah, we’ll be okay. Don’t worry about me, Melvin.”

Betsy puts a hand on the back of Melvin’s arm. Whatever Melvin wants to say, it vanishes. He wets his lips down. “Gimme an hour,” he says. “I’ll try to patch this up.”

“I’ll wait outside.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Betsy says. “You’ll wait upstairs. The sink has stopped flooding the kitchen, and there’s coffee. You look like you need it.”

Her stomach churns. “I really don’t—”

“I need to do paperwork anyway, so you’ll have the kitchen to yourself.” Betsy looks far too knowing, as she says that. “If you wander around Battery Park for an hour people will wonder if you’re crazy. It’s too hot outside.”

_If he wasn’t trying to kill Matt, then—_

( _Bang._ )

“I can’t sit still right now,” she says, raspy. “Anything here that needs to be done?”

Betsy glances at Melvin again. “I think we can come up with something.”

.

.

.

It’s basically the one thing to go right the whole day long when she gets back to find Matt still completely asleep. Kate, curled into the side of the couch, looks up from her iPad game, and cracks her lollipop between her teeth. “Welcome home, soldier.”

“Don’t need soldier jokes right now.” Darcy steps out of her shoes, and pulls the hem of her button down out of her slacks, undoing it. She’s wearing a tank-top underneath, and besides, it’s not like Kate hasn’t seen her worse. “Everything okay here?”

“You’re gonna have to tape him snoring to get him to admit it. He wouldn’t believe me when I told him earlier.” Kate rolls the stick of the lollipop with her tongue. “He slept for most of the day. I woke him up every hour to make sure, you know, he wasn’t dying or anything, that’s what Google said to do when you have like…head trauma. Talked to Foggy and Karen on the phone, fell back to sleep. Jess called to see if you were okay.”

It’s one thing to get a message from Malcolm, but from _Jess?_ “Really? She actually asked?”

“She asked if the pair of you were dead, and when I said no, she hung up, so…yeah.”

She’s not sure if she should be touched, or pissed off. “I’ll call her later. Did Foggy say anything about the witpro agreement to Matt, or did he just—”

“Darcy,” Kate says. “Take a nap.”

“Can’t.” She pushes her glasses up, and wipes her eyes. “There’s still the meet with the DA later tonight, and I should have done some filing while I was at the courthouse earlier, for the new client, I didn’t think about it, but I—”

“ _Darcy_ ,” Kate says again. She unfolds from the couch, and takes Darcy’s suit jacket and the button-down, wrinkling her nose. “Gross. Seriously, go change clothes and sleep for like…two hours. Please. You’re always lecturing me for not sleeping enough.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Hypocrite,” Kate says, and there’s four out of five. Still, at least Kate says it fondly. “Go lie down at least, if you don’t want to sleep. And if you do, you know, I’ll wake you up if anything happens.”

She wavers. “If _anything_ happens, Kate, you swear—”

“I swear.” Kate pops her lightly with one fist. “Go change clothes and lie down, seriously. I don’t want to see you for an hour, at least.”

If she falls asleep, she probably won’t wake up for a day. Still. It’s not entirely a bad idea. “If I’m not awake before seven, Kate, come in. I don’t care if you think I need more sleep, I need to be there when they go to meet with the DA. And not seven-thirty, Kate, seven exactly.”

“Fine.” Kate flaps a hand. “Leave me to my Angry Birds.”

Matt doesn’t stir through the whole process of detangling from her pantsuit. Darcy clambers up onto the bed next to him, and settles, pressed close into his side even with the afternoon sun shining bright in through the windows. Then, finally, he shifts, and curls around her. He’s only just barely awake when his eyes slit open, fingers tickling over her ribs. “Hey.”

“Hey.” Darcy hooks her hair out of her face. “How’s your head?”

“Better.” And there go the eyebrows, doing the caterpillar creep. “I shouldn’t be spending the whole day lying around like this.”

“Don’t start that again.” She shoves her glasses up her nose. “I’m still pissed that I had to actually physically shout you into a corner, Matt, don’t push it.”

Matt traces his thumb around a bruise. “I know.”

“I don’t want to go over it again, just—” Darcy shifts, balancing on one elbow. “You are actually, legitimately, the most frustrating person I have ever met in my life, and sometimes it’s not in a good way. That’s all.”

His lips quirk, more sadness then smile. Matt catches her hand, and presses the pads of her fingers to his mouth. “I’m an asshole.”

“Yeah, well, it’s good you know that,” she says, and he snorts. “Melvin says that he needs to make a new helmet. He did a patch job on the one you have now, but it’s fragile. It could break if there’s any significant stress on it.”

Matt sighs. “Figured as much. What about the client?”

“Racial discrimination suit, Title II stuff. Should be easy enough to deal with, if the school we’re filing against doesn’t pull an asshat move and try to fight it. They probably will, because we have shit luck and nobody likes being called a racist, no matter if they are or not, but I mean, the longer the suit lasts, the longer she pays us, which is…mercenary but okay with me.”

“Hm.” Matt scuffs his fingers back and forth over her shoulder blade, thoughtfully. He’s put on a shirt since she left, and the fabric tickles against her bare arm. “What’s her name?”

“Marisol Guerra. New to the city, and first thing she gets is a racist douchefuck trying to kick her out of a university concert.” Her elbow hurts. She settles on her side on the mattress, feeling oddly exposed and awful, as if she’s a beetle that’s been knocked onto its back and she can’t get her many feet under her again. “Betsy agrees with Claire and me when she says you should probably lie in bed and rest for at least a week.”

“You know I can’t do that.”

“Yeah, well, arguably she could say the same thing about me and my probable concussion.” She slips her hand up under his shirt, pressing her thumb to the scar Nobu left behind. “We can be stupid and reckless together, if you want. Just not today.”

Matt snorts. “Typically that seems to be how it works.”

“I’m a corruptive influence,” she says, and he laughs again. “Think about it. I asked you to work with me back in that alleyway, not the other way around. I led the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen astray.”

“That’s entirely how everything started.” The smile fades a little. Matt shifts, settling on his back, and when she lifts her head to look at him there’s a smear of blood on the underside of his chin that she hadn’t noticed when she’d left this morning. “Did something happen?”

“Nothing,” she says. Or she tries to say it. The word won’t come out. Darcy kicks the blanket off, and puts her head to his chest, her ear over his heart. Matt lets out a rattling breath when she does it, and threads his fingers through her curls. She can’t speak for a long time. When she does, her eyes are damp all over again. “You mean other than you nearly dying and then being an asshole about it?”

His heart stutters under her ear. “I’m sorry,” he says, very soft. “I am.”

“For nearly dying or for being an asshole?”

“Both.”

“I’m attributing about thirty-five percent of you being an asshole to the fact that you are very seriously concussed. Pretty sure that means you’re legally impaired at the moment.” She sniffs. “But only about thirty-five percent. You can definitely keep right on apologizing for the other sixty-five.”

Matt sets his mouth back to her hair. “Coffee and scones.”

“That’s what’s known as bribery, counselor.” Darcy listens to his heart for a minute or two. The longer she hears it, the more she unwinds, until it’s not fury leaching through her but exhaustion, until she can barely shift her hand from the amount of effort it would take to peel herself away. “Jen was angry that we took Grotto’s case.”

“Jen?”

“She’s working the investigative team for the Punisher.”

She can actually _hear_ him frowning. It’s like there’s a hornet’s nest somewhere in the room, and someone’s poked it with a stick. Less a sound than a feeling, but still completely audible. “How’s that work with conflict of interest?”

“Technically the Grotto and Brass thing doesn’t have anything to do with the Punisher. The witpro is with Brass. She sat in because, you know, the Punisher wants Grotto dead. Though with Reyes it’s hard to say whether or not she just…doesn’t care about the conflict and wanted Jen there to throw us off our game. She pulls a lot of shit, Reyes.”

He nods, and waits. Sometimes she really hates that he can read her so goddamn well. Darcy swallows, and hides her face under her hair for a moment, breathing.

“Are—am I being hypocritical for keeping Jen in the dark? I know—I know we talked about it, and it’d put her in such a terrible position, considering she’s at the DA, it’s not that I don’t trust her, Matt, but—but am I being a hypocrite for not telling her?”

Matt draws his thumb along the curve of her ear. “You’re asking me about hypocrisy after what happened this morning?”

“You’re contrite today. Catholicism hitting you hard or did Foggy lecture you?”

He scoffs, like that’s ridiculous. Darcy slips her hand under the collar of his shirt, draws her fingers over one of the scars, and waits. Eventually, he laughs into her hair. “No, it was Kate.” 

“Kate? Really?”

“Occasionally she gets spitty.” There’s a fondness in the way he says it that makes her lips twitch. It’s not the moment, she thinks, to smile, but she wants to anyway. “Sometimes watching the pair of you is like watching a baby falcon imprint on a cat. It’s fascinating.”

“Don’t try to make this funny.”

“Darcy, look at me,” he says. She listens to his heart for a second or two longer, one beat, two, three, and digs her chin into his chest, half on top of him with their ribs knocking against each other, sprawling. Matt shifts his hand to her cheek, strokes over the bone. “You’ve been crying.”

“Only a little. It’s been a day.”

Matt presses his thumb to her lip, very carefully, barely stinging. He traces the line of her jaw. “Do you think you’re being hypocritical, for not telling her?”

“I’m asking because I don’t—I’m not sure.” Darcy leans into his hand, trying to breathe. “I know _why_. I don’t want to make her have to choose between her job and—and knowing this, and getting involved with it, because Jen would, you know she would, she can never keep her nose out of things. But Matt, she thinks—she thinks someone’s hurting me, that something’s wrong, and I can’t tell her what’s really going on. I don’t think I’ve told her the full truth since the Goodmans. She’s my sister, and I’m lying to her because of this, and that’s…yeah. That’s hypocritical, I think.”

“Kind of.” It doesn’t hurt, just kind of echoes, someone ringing a bell inside her head. “Yeah.”

“You’re supposed to tell me I’m a saint, Matt, Jesus.”

The bruises on his face look like stones at the bottom of a dark river, flickers of shadow and light. “I don’t lie to you, remember?”

“ _Ouch_.” She puts her mouth to his chest, through the shirt. “You’re mean.”

“You knew that coming into this.” Matt trails his fingers up her spine, vertebra by vertebra, tracing his way to the tattoo on her neck and back down again to the Templar cross at the small of her back. He doesn’t say anything for a long time. “I’m uncomfortable enough as it is having so many people know. The more people who know a secret, the likelier it is that it gets spilled, and I don’t—I don’t want any of them to wind up in danger because of something we did. That’s not something that’s acceptable.”

“Of course not.” She rests her cheek to his chest again. One beat, and two, and three. “I hate lying to Jen, Matt. I _hate_ lying to Jen. And you nearly died, and I’m just—it’s not a good day.”

“You’re overstretching yourself.” Matt tangles his fingers in the hair at the back of her head. “You work so damn hard, all the time, and it’s—you spend every single moment you’re awake trying to take care of everyone. And I love you for it, Darcy, but you can’t do it forever. You need to take your own advice, about trying to fix everything. You try, it’ll wind up killing you.”

“I haven’t hit my limit yet, Matthew.” Darcy starts to shift off him—his ribs can’t take this, not really—but Matt curls his fingers into her hip and holds her still. “It’s too hot for me to lie on you, let go.”

“I like feeling your heartbeat,” he says.

 _God, slay me._ “Don’t say nice things when you can barely stand up straight,” Darcy says, and Matt chuffs, crackling in his chest. “It’s not fair. Also, you telling me that I’m overstretching? Kind of rich.”

“Yeah, well, that’s a different discussion altogether.” Matt snakes his hand up under her tank top, pressing his fingers into the skin of her back. “We don’t have time to stop.”

“I know.”

She thinks, for a time, he might say something, but he doesn’t. When she lifts her head to look at him, his eyes are closed. He’s dozing, she thinks, something that he never, ever lets himself do anymore, and he needs it more than anything, really. More sleep. More time in the day. Darcy curls her fingers into the collar of his shirt and closes her eyes, glasses jamming into her temple.

( _Bang._ )

“I want to kill him,” she says, and Matt blinks his eyes open. “He shot you. I thought you were dead. I thought he tried to kill you. And Melvin—Melvin said it was probably just a warning, that he wasn’t _trying_ to kill you, but I saw you die, and I thought—I want—”

“I know,” Matt says, and that’s all that needs to be said. She curls up on his chest as best she can, and Matt keeps his arms around her, and yeah. It’s a terrible, no-good, very awful day, but at least she has this. Even if it’s only until seven.

.

.

.

The phone buzzes.

_Checking in._

**You’re late.**

_Things were complicated. I had to find a place to settle that wasn’t completely out of the realm of probability, which is difficult here._

**Regardless.**

_Don’t be grumpy._

**All going according to plan?**

_Best as I can manage. I’ll call when I get back tonight._

**I’ll be waiting with baited breath.**

_You don’t have to be snarly._

.

.

.

“Darcy.”

Darcy wrinkles her nose, and presses her face into Matt’s throat. “Mmph.”

“Darcy, your phone.”

“No. Phone is unacceptable.” It’s too hot to pull the blankets up, but she does it anyway, rolling off Matt and hiding underneath them. “No.”

“I think it’s Ben.”

And sure enough, her phone is talking with Ben Urich’s voice. “ _Pick up the phone, Lewis._ ” God, hasn’t he dragged enough information out of her today? She hides in the pillow, just for a moment, and then snags the cell phone off the bedside table, flopping back onto Matt’s outstretched arm. “What.”

“You don’t have to confirm,” Ben says, without preamble. “Not officially, anyway. But am I right in saying that Nelson, Murdock, and Lewis negotiated a deal with the DA to get Edgar Brass into custody in return for Grotto’s freedom?”

 _Oh my god, can I not get an hour’s peace?_ “Who the hell do you have in the DA’s office, Ben, Jesus.”

“That’s an answer in and of itself.” Under her head, Matt’s arm goes taut. Ben sounds—well. He sounds like he did back during the Fisk fiasco, tightly leashed to keep the nerves from leaking through. “Lewis, Brass is one of the men who died in that fire I told you about. The coroner identified him through dental records half an hour ago. Whatever the DA’s planning on doing with your boy tonight, it has nothing to do with Edgar Brass.”

Every single cell in her body turns to ice. “Shit,” she says, and drops the phone, bolting off the bed. She nearly trips over the sheets that are dangling on the floor. “Shit fuck _shit,_ I _knew_ it sounded weird—”

“Thanks, Ben,” Matt says into the phone, and then hangs up. He swings his feet down onto the floor. “What was he talking about, fire?”

“Punisher’s been a busy boy, likes burning people alive apparently, just—fucking hell.” It’s six-thirty. The meet with Brass was scheduled for ten, but they’ll already have set everything up, Grotto will already be in transit and prep, she won’t be able to get in until the DA opens the doors and she is going to _strangle_ Samantha Reyes, holy shit— “I knew it sounded weird, Matt, I _knew_ it sounded weird, I didn’t ask but I didn’t think she’d be so fucking stupid to try and—Kate!”

“’sup,” says Kate. She’s barefoot, and she’s stolen one of the popsicles Darcy had hidden in the very back of the freezer. “Clint’s abusing my dog again.”

“I thought Lucky was a share-deal with you and Clint.” Like children and a divorced couple, she thinks, but she doesn’t say that. Kate gets twitchy whenever someone talks about her and Clint as a Possible Item, though Darcy to this day isn’t quite sure if it’s because she wants it, or because she does _not_ want it, ever, at all. “Never mind. Go home, get changed. I need you to go out with me tonight.”

“Ooo, in front of your boyfriend, too.” Kate waggles her eyebrows “Ballsy, Lewis.”

That doesn’t actually deserve a response. “Just _go_ ,” Darcy snaps, and Kate snaps a lazy salute with the popsicle stick before darting out the rooftop access door again. The Lilith suit is folded neatly and resting on the arm of the chair, on top of the Daredevil suit. There’s still a hole in the sleeve from the shotgun pellet. _Fuck._ Darcy rolls her shoulder, gritting her teeth at the tug of the muscle. It’s still too bright out to really wear the Lilith suit in public, but once the sun sets— “Matt, you should go back to bed.”

“You’re not going after him alone,” Matt says, and snatches the Daredevil suit away from her before she can hide it. “Remember?”

Fuck her and fuck her promises. “The helmet’s a disaster, you _couldn’t hear_ less than six hours ago, and you could fall over if someone hits you too hard, you shouldn’t be—”

Matt catches her by the back of the neck and kisses her, hard, scratching his teeth into her lip and scorching at the inside of her mouth. Darcy squeaks— _holy shit_ —and then fists one hand up into the fabric of his shirt, scraping. When he lifts his jaw, pulls back, he’s panting, and she’s bit his lip hard enough to make it swell, a threat and a question. She has to work hard to make herself remember how to swallow.

“You can’t kiss me when I argue with you,” she says, hoarse. “That’s not how this works.”

"Not why I'm doing it."

"Don't snipe at me."

He shakes his head. “You can’t go alone.”

“I’ll have Kate with me, you stubborn bastard.” 

Matt tilts and presses another kiss to her mouth, to her cheek, feathering. “I know you will,” he says, “but you’re not going after him alone.”

“Matt—”

“He took both of us down last time,” he says, lips against her skin. “Please, Darcy. Even if he didn’t—even if it _was_ on purpose, even if he didn’t try to kill me, please. I need to—”

He stops. _Know,_ she thinks. He needs to know that she’s not going to die. And yeah, if it were reversed, if she’d been the one shot and Matt the one heading out again, right back up against the guy who did it, she’d be kicking and screaming to come along. She _would_. Darcy goes up onto her toes, puts her forehead to his cheek, holding on.

“If I didn’t know you as well as I do,” she says, “and if I didn’t know that you know that I would cut you up into tiny pieces and feed you to sewer ‘gators if you tried it, this would feel a hell of a lot like you’re manipulating me into making me go along with your crazy.”

He stills. Then, carefully, he shifts his hands to her hips. “Darcy, that’s not—”

“I know.” Her eyes sting a little. “It’s not—I want you there. I need to—”

 _I need someone to hold me back,_ she thinks. She trusts Kate, entirely, but she’s never told Kate about Eli. She’s never told _anyone_ about Eli, about Eli’s father, about the knife and the back door and wondering if tonight was the night she’d finally be brave enough to do it. Not even Foggy knows the whole of it. Just Matt. Only Matt. If anyone can drag her back from wanting to kill someone, it’s Matt.

“You stay back,” Darcy says, in a wet voice. “No stunts. Don’t try to do anything fancy. The _instant_ your head starts swimming, you get out of the way and stay out of it. And for God’s sake, don’t step in front of a gun again.”

He presses his palms to her cheeks, swiping the damp away with his thumbs. “I’ll do my best.”

“You get hurt,” she says, still pressed up into him, “I will actually _kill_ you, Matt Murdock.”

“You keep saying that and you never follow through,” he says, and she bites his lip hard enough to break a scab just for that, because _you bastard, don’t tease me about you dying._ Then she goes to find something to wear over the top of the suit, because she’s not about to walk out the door without Lilith on her skin.

Darcy’s the one to call Foggy, because if Matt does it Foggy will skip rationality and go into lecture mode, and that’s not something they have time for at the moment. “Cancel the deal,” she says, when Foggy picks up. “Reyes is playing us. She’s going to try and use Grotto as bait to draw out this son of a bitch.”

“Fucking hell,” Foggy says. His voice cracks. “ _Fucking hell._ Is this woman insane?”

“I don’t know, just—go talk to Grotto, tell him to reject the deal, ask for something different. Stall her, I don’t care. I’m not about to let Samantha Reyes put our client in danger because of this crazy fucking plan, no matter what it does to our image with the DA.” She yanks her pants up, fumbles with the zipper. “We’re going to go out and try to track this guy down before she does something else completely reckless and idiotic.”

“By _we_ I’m choosing to believe you mean you and Kate, because I would really like to think that Matt is not being so stupid as to get involved when he should be in the hospital getting an MRI and a fucking psych eval—”

“Thanks, buddy,” Matt says, loud enough that Foggy can hear, and grabs a sweatshirt, pulling it on over the top of his suit. “Appreciate it.”

“You’re welcome,” Foggy snaps. “You’re a jackass.”

“He knows,” Darcy says, and Matt pinches her ribs. “You guys need to keep your heads down and stay out of sight, see if you can get Grotto moved to a safe house Brett knows in the meantime, call every favor you have—”

“No,” Foggy says.

“—it’ll—what?”

“No, I think—” He swallows, audibly. “Darcy, I think we should go along with it.”

Darcy drops her glove. She curses, and fumbles it off the floor. “Foggy, that’s insane, that’s _asking_ for some crazy guy to shoot at you—”

“Like the pair of you don’t do it all the time?” He has the Iron Nelson Voice on. _Fucking hell._ “You and Kate and Matt are going to do the stupid thing of trying to track this guy down before he gets anywhere near us, and I—I trust you, okay? I trust you to keep him away from us. If we back out on the deal with Reyes right now, she’ll go apeshit, and the whole thing will come out, which, no bueno, we don’t want that happening, not right away—”

“Don’t want Reyes exposed for the Bellatrix Lestrange level insane that she is? Jesus, Foggy—”

“Darcy,” Matt says, “let him finish.”

“Matt—”

“I’m putting you on speaker,” Foggy says. There’s a clatter. “Karen’s nodding a lot.”

She would be. Of course she fucking would be. “Guys, that’s—I don’t want you anywhere near this, neither of us want you _anywhere_ near this—”

“You think we want the pair of you near this either?” _Hypocrite_. “It’ll work if we do it this way, seriously. We don’t tell Reyes we know. If it goes wrong, yeah, we could get our asses sued, but the same thing would happen if we _didn’t_ know and everything went down like this. It’s a risk I’m willing to take.”

“Grotto will never go for it,” Matt says, and Darcy hits speaker on her end, too, leaving the phone on the coffee table as she eases the sleeve of the Lilith suit over her bandaged arm. “He’s scared shitless as it is.”

“Not if the pair of us are there with him to keep him quiet, he won’t be.” Foggy takes a breath. “We don’t tell Reyes. If it gets anywhere close to her actually sending Grotto out as, you know, bait, then we call it off, but not right away. You guys try to catch up with this bastard before he gets anywhere near. If Reyes is expecting the Punisher, then she’s gonna stick herself into a fucking bunker, way out of his line of fire, we’ll be totally safe. You’ll be the ones out there in his crosshairs—don’t make that _I’m going to argue_ noise, Darcy, don’t you dare!”

“I’ll argue if I think you’re being _crazy,_ Foggy!”

“You said you wanted my help,” Foggy snaps. “Don’t take that back now. It’ll work. Right?”

“It’s a shot, Darcy,” Karen says. Her voice is all high and nervy, but yeah, that’s the Karen Page Has Made Her Mind Up tone, and she is going to kill them, both of them, slowly, beat them up and lock them in cages and not _ever_ let them out of her sight again. “We have a shot this way, and he—this guy needs to be stopped, okay? Whoever he is and whatever started this, he needs to be stopped, and this is a way we could do it without anyone else getting hurt.”

“They’re not wrong,” Matt says, and Darcy nearly shakes him before she remembers the lump on his head. His jaw is set. “Doesn’t mean it’s happening.”

“Don’t be gross, Matt,” says Karen, and at the same time, Foggy says, “You act like a reckless dipshit all the time and you tell us we can’t? The fuck—”

“This is insane, you guys, that’s not something—there are so many ways this could go wrong, we can’t risk that, that’s _crazy—_ ”

“Darcy.” Karen’s voice muffles, and comes through clear again. “This guy doesn’t shoot the innocent, okay? He has specific targets. He wouldn’t kill us. I don’t think.”

Matt snarls. “Because _I don’t think_ is a guarantee—”

“There’s not really any way either of you can stop us,” Foggy says. “Not unless you call Reyes, and then _you_ get to explain to her how you’re getting sensitive information from inside the DA’s office without breaking a lot of laws, Darcy. Have fun with that one.” Pause. “How did you hear about this, anyway?”

“Ben,” Matt says, and Karen says, “Ah.”

“Let us do this, guys,” Foggy says.

“Let us help,” says Karen.

“Are you both on crack?”

“Matt, seriously, you know it could work.” Foggy coughs. “It could work. We can convince Grotto to go along with it, full disclosure, we’ll manage it—it could _work_ , Matt. It’d get this guy off the street much faster than any crazy-ass plan Reyes has cooked up in the past twenty-four hours—”

“Because a five minute plan is so much better,” says Darcy acidly, but Matt takes the phone from her before she can hang up.

“We call you thirty minutes before Grotto gets sent out,” Matt says. “He’s going out at ten, we call you at nine-thirty. If we haven’t found anything, Foggy, call it off.”

“Matt—”

“They’re going to do it whether we tell them no or not, Darcy. This way at least we can make sure they get out before anything bad happens.”

“We don’t know what this guy is going to _do_!”

“Which is why we catch up to him before he has a chance to do it.”

“Matt—”

“Thirty minutes, Foggy.”

“Ten,” Foggy says. “If it gets down to the wire I can say Tower was twitchy and it made me suspicious or something, makes it easier to convince her how I know.”

“ _Jesus Christ,_ ” Darcy says, and drops down hard onto the couch. “Matt—”

“We can’t stop them, Darcy, Foggy’s right.” He could be pulling out his own molars saying it, judging by the look on his face. “If Reyes blows the deal herself then we can sue her for reckless endangerment—”

“She could turn that right back around on us if it comes out we knew beforehand! Not to mention the fact that this is actually, literally insane—”

“Not if we move fast enough to track him down before he gets anywhere close.” Matt shakes his head. “If Grotto’s out of police custody for a minute then he’s dead. Safest place they can be is in the middle of whatever SWAT team that Reyes has pulled to keep herself safe.”

That, at least, is true, but— “This guy takes down dozens of mobsters all at once, all on his own, a SWAT team isn’t going to make much difference—”

“The Punisher seems to have a code, whoever he is, he doesn’t hurt anyone outside of the gangs.”

“He shot you!”

“He didn’t kill me,” Matt says, and fire leaps up her throat. “He could have and he didn’t, Darcy. He could have killed you and he didn’t. That means something, it has to—”

“You do a lot of reckless shit, Matt, but this—”

“We’re doing it, Darcy,” says the phone. She can’t tell if it’s Karen or Foggy. “You remember what you said? You risk yourself. We’re risking ourselves. Our choice, Darcy.”

That part, at least, was Karen. Darcy hides her face in her hands, and breathes. Matt says, “Half an hour, Foggy. Nine-thirty. You don’t hear that we have him by then, then you call it off.”

“Fine,” Foggy says, and hangs up.

She has to take a few minutes. When she finally lifts her head, Matt’s fully in uniform, aside from his gloves (which are hidden, she thinks, in his hoodie pocket) and the helmet, which will probably go in her bag. “I don’t know when we switched roles,” she says, “but this is very uncomfortable for me.”

He gives her the phone back. “We’ll catch up before he gets to them, Darcy.”

“We’d better,” Darcy says. “I don’t want to think about what’ll happen if we don’t.”

His lips thin out. Matt says nothing. When they leave the apartment, it’s through the front door, hands looped together to hide the way Darcy’s fingers are shaking.

Kate volunteers to go and watch the bunker. Edgar Brass apparently haunts—used to haunt—any number of wrecked buildings still leftover from the disasters of May 2012, and buildings slated for demolition offer a multitude of cubby holes she can tuck herself into and keep an eye on things without being seen.  “I’m a Hawkeye, remember? I’m good at watching. Unless you want me along tracking down the Pistol Packin’ Mama, but I’m not entirely sure that three people wandering around in hoodies in the middle of summer is going to do anything other than make people think that we’re trying to shoplift.” She spins her bow, not around in a circle but snapping it back and forth, so the string presses to the back of her hand, then the inside of her wrist, then the back of her hand again. “Really, though, Katie needs to shoot something.”

“Don’t shoot Reyes, Kate,” Darcy says. “Wouldn’t be good for your image.”

“Technically it’s Clint’s image, and he fucks it up well enough on his own.” She tips her glasses down her nose. “I can shoot her anyway if you want me to. I might, if she does something stupid.”

“Don’t tempt me.”

She snorts, and trots off without any guarantees. Which is Kate, so Darcy isn’t particularly worried. Not more than usual, anyway.

The Burren Club on 47th and 10th looks like something out of _Saving Private Ryan,_ a wreck of shattered glass and punctured walls. The bodies have been carted away, couldn’t have been there for more than a few hours, so she really must be imagining the smell in the air, something hanging thick and heavy, traces of meat and blood and whiskey. Shards of the window crunch under her shoes. “He wouldn’t come back here,” she says in a low voice, as Matt pushes his hands into his pockets to keep himself from touching things. “He’s finished here. I might not be a psychologist, but I don’t think this guy likes to come and gloat over his old battles.”

Matt shakes his head. “Not very sentimental, no.”

Darcy steps over another piece of fractured glass. There are photos on the walls, some of them laced through with bullet holes. Mostly of men, one or two with female bartenders alongside them. An Irish flag hangs from the ceiling, tattered and stained. There’s one framed poster, a stylized harp and curling letters. _Éirinn go Brách_. “These guys liked their mother country, that’s for sure.”

“Kitchen Irish families tend to.” Matt crouches, and draws something out from under the table, a pen. He tucks it in his pocket. “I think half the people in my dad’s old apartment complex were Brannigans or O’Reardons. On St. Patrick’s Day the whole building would go nuts.”

“Are you telling me you could have been an Irish mobster?”

“My dad would’ve killed me,” Matt says.  “ _An té a luíonn le madaí, eiroidh sé le dearnaid_.”

“The fuck?”

“Basically, lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.” He taps his fingertips to the floor. “There’s a hollow space under here. Weapons and drugs. Surprised the police haven’t found it yet.”

“I’m more interested in the fact that you can, apparently, speak Gaelic, and I have never heard you do that before. I mean, I knew you were Irish, but like—what the fuck, Matt, you tell people things like that.”

“That’s about all I know, other than _cheers_ and some insults that my dad would never translate. My grandmother would cuss him out in it sometimes.”

So basically equivalent to her sparing, scattered memories of Russian cursewords and a few key phrases. Like, _this borscht is shit._ “Ah.”

He sways back up to his feet. “Speaking of fleas, there was a dog in here somewhere. Not here anymore.”

“Cops would have taken it away, if it survived.”

“Maybe.” Matt skirts a pool of blood. “This way.”

There’s a tie pin on the bar counter. Darcy glances back at the door, at the _crime scene, do not cross_ tape, and then slips the thing into her bag and follows.

The back way in is part-garage, part-kennel, part-chopshop. Motor oil and wet dog. There’s an empty cage in the corner, a chain driven deep into the wall with a clip at the end to keep an animal. Blood on the floor, smearing dark over the concrete. Another taped-out silhouette of a dead body. Darcy rests her gloved fingers to the top of one of the tables, where a dead welding torch angles over a half-finished steel project. It might have been some kind of shelving thing, maybe. “I’m honestly not sure there’s anything here for us to find.”

“It’s the only place he’s been we know for sure that hasn’t been set on fire or filled up with angry bikers.” Other than that rooftop on 10th, down by the hospital, but she doesn’t particularly want to revisit that, and she’s not sure Matt does either. “If there’s a trail to pick up, it has to be here.”

“We hope.” _Dear Punisher: Please step in a pool of blood so we can follow your footprints._ It’d make things easier. She flips open a notebook on the table, pages through it. Names and dates and money. A bookie’s record.  “I think they were dogfighting,” she says, and turns another page. “These aren’t names I would give humans. Unless there are actually people in this world who would willingly name their child _Ripper_ or _Star Destroyer_. Wait, Star Destroyer? Star Destroyer.” She frowns. “There’s a _Boba Fett_ on this list too. I dislike the idea that animal abusers can also enjoy _Star Wars._ In fact, I reject it entirely.”

“Seems like a sound strategy.” He cocks his head, listening. “More heroin in a wall-safe.”

“Wanna crack that sucker and sell it? It’d pay off our debts.”

Matt snorts, and touches the ground again, searching. “There would have been a guard out here. He wasn’t shot, the gunpowder isn’t fresh enough. Strangled, stabbed maybe. Not enough blood for the second one, but there could have been a tarp that’s been taken away.”

Darcy has his knife, so she’s really hoping it wasn’t a stabbing. There are phone numbers in the back of the bookie’s record, names. She takes a photo of it with her phone. All likelihood, a lot of these guys are dead by now, but there’s no point in not checking into it. There’s a special kind of hell, she thinks, for people who make animals kill each other for fun. “Like I trust your nose right now. What the fuck happened in Josie’s, anyway? Grotto was actually covered in blood, how did you not notice that?”

“You know how many gangsters were in there in bloody jackets? Not to mention the weather and the number of people and the alcohol. Someone spilled a full thing of vodka the next table over, and it was pretty powerful.”

“If you say so.” Darcy pads over to stand by his shoulder, peering at the ground. “What are you looking for, anyway?”

“There’s fresh blood here,” he says, and taps his index finger to the concrete.

“There also used to be a dog there that they were using for dogfighting, the poor thing was probably scared out of its mind and bit one of the handlers.”

“When Foggy and I were here last night I didn’t hear anyone say anything about a dog.”

“So they took it away before you showed up.” The spatter pattern’s angled, oddly, though she’s still reading about forensic science; she doesn’t have the pathology degree to know what degree of impact the thing had. “You think this guy has enough of a heart to rescue the Brannigans’ dog?”

“You talked to him, I didn’t. What do you think?”

_Stay out of the way._

( _Bang._ )

“I don’t know what to think anymore,” she says.

Matt turns his face up to hers for a moment. In the dark, she can’t really make him out, just shadows in more shadows. He wets his lips, and focuses on the floor again. “Could there be a connection?”

“Between the dog and the Punisher?”

“Between him,” Matt says, “and us.”

Darcy stills. The baton feels cold in her hand when she twists her fingers around it, pressing her thumb into the pliant rubber of the grip. “You mean, like—he’s doing this to get our attention? Because I feel like if that were the case he would have left little notes for us. Haikus could be good, just _bang_ written over again with the last line being _die, Daredevil and Lilith._ Or maybe couplets. _So long as wood can burn or men can die; so long I kill, and hope to make thee rage-quit with a sigh._ ”

His mouth twitches. “You’re butchering Shakespeare now?”

“Made you laugh, didn’t it?” Her palm is slick with sweat. “What are you thinking? What kind of connection could he have with us?”

“Karen said something.” He stands, drifts over closer to the garage door, and crouches again. “More blood, here.”

“Did Karen come over?”

“No, just—when she called to talk about the witpro agreement, she said something.” He touches his fingers to it, and grimaces. “Tacky, still. Humidity’s keeping it from drying all the way out.”

“Gross,” says Darcy. “What did Karen say?”

“Trail leads off this way.” He stands, and lifts the crime scene tape, letting her pass before ducking under it and stepping away. “Karen thinks that—I don’t know exactly how she said it. But with everything we’ve done, everything we’ve been doing, we—we opened a door to something that we might not be able to stop. That the Punisher looked at us, and decided that he could do things like this, because of our example. That this is our fault.”

 _Christ._ The nausea’s come right back, sure enough. It makes, she thinks, a sick kind of sense, that other people would follow their example. Other people _have_ followed their example. But this one, this one man—Christ. “I don’t think she meant to throw blame anywhere, Matt. That doesn’t sound like Karen.”

“Wouldn’t it be, though?” In his hood, in the dark, she can’t make out his face, only the way his lips have twisted, curling up into a knot. “Brett talked about it too, a little, but—but what we’ve done, what we’ve accomplished, it does open a kind of door. What the Punisher is doing is a fundamental misinterpretation of what Daredevil and Lilith want, of what we’re trying to do, but—but isn’t there a theme, there? Some kind of connection?”

“You know it’s not the first time that that’s happened.” She spins the baton, and puts it back into her bag. Her fingers brush over the hilt of the drop point knife. “There are the Devil Worshippers, Lilith’s Whores. They—regular people who take some kind of inspiration from us, try to go out and do it themselves. If that _is_ what the Punisher’s doing, then it wouldn’t be the first time.”

“But it’s the first time that people have died like this,” Matt says. “It’s the first time that it’s happened on a scale like this. This guy isn’t just some kid beating up a mugger, he’s trained, he has tactics—”

“What he decided to do doesn’t get laid at our feet, Matt. It _doesn’t_.” 

She’s not sure he hears it. She’s not sure _she_ hears it, really. The words are sour. _It’s not our fault, it can’t be our fault,_ but would this guy have even considered taking lives and guns into his own hands if not for the fact that Lilith and Daredevil exist? That they wander out every night to beat the living shit out of the people who were trying, _are_ trying, still trying to ruin whatever good is left in this fucking city? If they’d never existed, would the Punisher have happened at all? Sometimes, she thinks, it’s hard to see the good through the shit that they wade through, all the things that come forward past midnight, the cruelty, the brutality. The depths to which people can sink. _You can just keep digging deeper,_ Matt had said after Gao, and yeah, you can just keep sinking. They keep cycling back to that one question, that one, stupid question of blame. _Can you take responsibility for what happens in the name of an idea that you’ve been trying to protect?_

There’s a story about that, she thinks. Student protesters in Nazi Germany, caught and executed. A dream before the day they died. _The idea will survive us, and succeed, despite all pitfalls and obstacles._ They’d been fighting for freedom. Is that even comparable to this?

“People make their own choices.” Darcy shifts her bag over her shoulder. “People are always gonna make their own choices. If we set an example, then yeah, maybe someone _actually insane_ will follow it. But that doesn’t make what this bastard is doing anything close to our fault, Matt. Our responsibility, maybe. Something we need to handle. But not our fault.”

“Yeah,” Matt says. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

The blood trail ends. Or it skitters, back and forth, taking them in circles all over Hell’s Kitchen. Throw someone off the trail, she thinks, or maybe fade into the background, wandering around with no purpose, trying to see if anyone was following him. They lose it three times, once at 43rd and 10th, again on 44th and 11th, and then again on 41st and 9th when they have to duck out of the way of a squad car cruising near the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Interesting place to hide, the bus terminal, because yeah, it means a quick getaway, but it’s also one of the first places the cops will go if they think someone’s trying to make a break for it on public transit. The sun’s set. Nearly nine, now. They’re running out of time. “Anything?”

He lifts his chin. “That building, I think. Blood near the stoop.”

“There’s a keypad on the door.” She presses her back to the wall. The fire escape is too far up off the ground to reach, even if Matt jumps, and it looks like the ladder’s locked into place anyway. _Of all the places for the fire escape to be properly maintained._ “What do you want to do? There are bars on all the windows, can’t get in that way.”

“Did you never do this as a kid?” Matt says, and smacks a few of the intercom buttons. Darcy bites back a yelp.

“What the _fuck—_ ”

“ _What_ ,” says a voice from the speaker. A guy, she thinks, raspy like he smokes a pack a day. “I don’t want to hear the word of Jesus again, Benny.”

“Sorry to bug you,” Matt says. “Just— I just moved in, I forgot my combination on the dining table, can you do me a favor and let me up?”

There’s a moment of silence. “Are you fucking stupid, man?”

“Kind of,” Matt says. “Occasionally, yeah.”

“Jesus,” says the voice, and then the door buzzes open. Matt knocks his shoulder into it, and dips his head into a little bow as she passes him on the way into the stained, grimy foyer. He lifts his eyebrows in a silent, _well?_

“Hey, I grew up in Georgia, dude. My breaking and entering was limited to throwing bricks through windows to unlock doors.”

That is _definitely_ a smirk on his mouth. Matt tugs the sleeve of her sweatshirt—it’s not a kiss, because she’s pretty sure it’d be a bad idea to do that half in costume—but it’s close enough to make her smile. “Blood goes up the stairs.”

“The elevator’s out,” she says. “So it would.”

The Punisher lives on the fourth floor at the end of the hall, no name above the buzzer, a torn carpet at the threshold. The door’s locked, but the hinges are flimsy, and no one’s on this floor anyway. Matt snaps it open with two sharp kicks, and sure enough, there’s a sudden, snarling bark, a rush of movement and the crack of a leash pulling taut. “Ah.”

“He doesn’t look like a Star Destroyer,” Darcy says from the hall. She’s mostly getting flashes of grey fur and yellow teeth, but the point stands. “I may have to give them Ripper, though.”

The blood quite arguably could have come from the dog. Once they get him calmed down enough to settle (actually calm enough to let her touch him, which is both fascinating and terrifying, considering there’s crusted blood on his mouth) she can see all the bandages, the marks from old fights. “Hey,” Darcy says, in a very quiet voice. When she reaches out, the dog flinches back, and snaps. “Hey, baby, what have they done to you, huh?”

“Jesus,” Matt says, and shuts the door behind him. It creaks open again as soon as he steps away. “It’s an armory.”

Cans on the table. Guns propped in boxes against the wall. Even a communications rig from a cop car, and holy shit, she’s not sure how someone would be able to get their hands on that without a lot of finagling and possibly bloodshed. _Holy shit._ She doesn’t crouch down, not within range, but she does offer her hand again, and when the dog doesn’t lunge at her, Darcy creeps closer. “Where do you even get this crap? It all looks military.”

“Black market, maybe. Back counters, back alleys.” He reaches out, and stops an inch away from one of the cans. “ _Jesus,_ ” Matt says again, much quieter and fiercer this time. “There are grenades in the box at the back.”

Fucking hell. She strokes her hand down the dog’s neck. The longer she stands near him, the quieter he gets, until he just starts watching her with his tongue between his teeth, observing. She folds his good ear through her fingers, experimentally. “He seems to have a system. Set things up in a grid. If things are missing, he could have gone to hit another gang.”

“Or he could have gone after Grotto.”

“Don’t remind me.” The dog knocks into her leg. Darcy puts her hand to the top of his head, scuffing the edge of the bandages. “I don’t think this guy was very good at the fight scene.”

“They still used him as a guard dog, so watch your fingers.”

It’s not like she’s going to bend down and stick her face near any of the teeth. She scrapes at the dog’s head with her nails, scratching a little. “What do you think?”

“He might already be at the ambush site.” Matt rubs at his jaw again, pressing his fingers into the back of his neck. “He’ll have to come back here eventually.”

“He might not before they send Grotto out.”

“We have half an hour left, still.” He snags one of the cans. It’s a pull-activation, she thinks. Yank the cord, run like hell. Or send smoke up like a fucking beacon, either way. “The trail ends here, it doesn’t go back out. He either patched himself up or stopped bleeding, and either way it means he could be anywhere in the city by now.”

“Want to go back to the Burren Club, see if we can find something else?”

“Don’t think there’s anything else to find.”

At the far end of the hallway, someone drops a bag of groceries, and swears. Darcy pushes the door shut before anyone else can see the freaking—is this what the inside of a terrorist cell looks like, all this shit? Is this what it looked like in Timothy McVeigh’s house after the Oklahoma City bombing? Christopher Dorner and the LAPD shootings? ( _They sound so white, Christ._ ) It’s like she’s stepped into a movie set. Chemicals sting in her nose. She keeps her back to the door, just to make sure it stays closed. “I don’t think this guy is stupid enough to just walk right into a trap.”

The rig buzzes again. Reyes. Matt’s mouth contorts, and he lets his hand rest to the back of the machine, listening. “Hear anything from Kate?”

“She says no movement. The cops have all set up in their own sniper positions. If he _is_ on his way there, he’s somewhere they don’t have eyes.” Not particularly encouraging. “You think he’s been there the whole time?”

“The stuff in here—” Matt pulls on a glove, starts flipping through channels on the rig. “This guy plans. He won’t expose himself until he needs to, until he’s certain he has the shot.”

“Walking into a hospital with a shotgun and a sniper rifle doesn’t seem much like planning to me.”

“Nobody there was supposed to put up a fight. We took him by surprise. He’ll have accommodated for that, this time, he’ll have distractions in place, he won’t have—”  

“Wait, wait wait wait, go back one.” Darcy steps away from the door, and the leash scrapes across the floor when the dog tries to follow her. Which, _ow,_ her heart. “Go back a channel, Matt, go back, I thought I heard—”

“—possible 10-33 at four-four and one-two, shots fired, all available units—”

“Ten-thirty-three, what’s a ten-thirty-three?”

“Explosion,” Matt says. “Shh.”

“—repeat, garage at four-four and one-two—”

“Garage at 44th and 12th,” Darcy says. “An explosion at a garage at 44th and 12th. Isn’t that in Dogs of Hell territory?”

Matt’s white around the mouth. “That’s the red herring.” 

“Ah, shit,” Darcy says. “We’re going to have to run, aren’t we.”

Ripper dusts his tail over the floor.

.

.

.

“This is fucking crazy,” Grotto says again. “The pair of you are _crazy._ ”

“Don’t back out on me now, Grotto.” At least he had the sense to wait to say it until Jen, Reyes, and Tower were out of the room. Karen yanks down hard on the button-down, trying to adjust it over the wire. “It’s the only way any of us can think to catch this guy.”

“I’d prefer not to die.” There’s sweat on his temples, along the column of his throat. “You know, just for further reference. It’s come way too close in the past couple of days.”

“You’re not going to die.” She fixes the shirt again, and steps away. “There are dozens of trained, armed men out there who are waiting to hit this guy with everything they have, and as soon as you get into the shipping container, they’ll have someone waiting for you. All you have to do is stand there, and call for Brass like he thinks you’re gonna, and then you can get out of sight. The next thing you know, you’ll be on a plane out to Florida with a new pair of swimming trunks.”

“Yeah, and what if he shoots me in the head the instant I step out that door?”

“He won’t.”

Grotto scowls at her. “You can’t know that, sweetheart.”

“Just sit there and be quiet.” Karen pushes him back onto a stool. “It’s a waiting game, now. They said Brass was supposed to show up at ten, so we wait until ten. Okay?”

“Fucking crazy,” Grotto says again, but at least he shuts up. He folds his arms over his chest and hunches, a kid trying to protect his balls from a bully, but he shuts up, and Karen moves away from him just as the door opens for Reyes, Tower, and Jen to trail back into the room. Jen looks like Karen feels, she thinks—sick to her stomach, scared out of her wits, and really, really pissed.

“They were arguing,” Foggy says in a low voice. Karen drops down into the chair next to him, turning her face so Tower can’t make out her expression. “I could hear Jen getting shouted down. Nothing in detail, but she didn’t sound happy.”

“You think she’s mad about this?”

“You live with her, Karen, what do you think?” He pushes his hair out of his eyes. He needs a haircut, Karen thinks fondly. He’s been letting it slide. “Jen’s as straight an arrow as you can get. Bullshit like this would give her an ulcer.”

It’s nine-twenty. Ten minutes until the deadline. Reyes settles into her rolling chair like a queen into a throne, fixing a headset over her hair. She doesn’t look at either of them. Jen keeps darting little glances at them, though, settled with her arms wound tight over her chest and her legs crossed, knotting herself up like an old oak.

“Anything?” Foggy says out of the corner of his mouth.

Karen shakes her head minutely, and peers over Foggy’s shoulder. The surveillance cameras have been up for an hour, ostensibly to let them know when the late, unlamented Edgar Brass showed up a la _A Christmas Carol_ ; nothing’s moved since the thing flickered on at about eight-thirty.

“We have incoming,” says Reyes, all of a sudden. Something cool and thin slips between Karen’s ribs, pricks into her lungs. “Brass.”

 _What? But_ —

Grotto doesn’t squawk. She half-expects him to, but he doesn’t. “I thought he wasn’t supposed to show up until ten. That’s when I said in the message, ‘s when I told him to show.”

“Yeah, well, apparently the guy’s a little eager to hear from you.” Reyes cuts her eyes from his head to his feet. “Can’t imagine why.”

“Look, lady, I’m helping you, least you can do is not be an ass about it.”

Foggy seizes her wrist. “Karen, they don’t—”

“Don’t what, Mr. Nelson?” Tower blinks slowly at them, like a tortoise. Or a cobra, she thinks. Slow and steady, searching for a weakness. Foggy puts on a smile that she can only remember seeing him use in Landman and Zack, months and months ago. At the same time, under the table, Karen texts Darcy. _SOS, going out early_.

“Nothing in particular.”

Across the table, Jen’s eyes narrow, and flick between Karen and Foggy. Karen gets to her feet. “Come on, Grotto. You’ll be fine, remember?”

“Kiss for good luck?” Grotto says, and she flips him off. She’s only half-listening.

_Where the hell are you guys?_

Her phone is silent and still in her hand.

.

.

.

From start to finish, this case has been an absolute fucking disaster, and she’s really, really wishing they’d just minded their own business and let Grotto faint at Josie’s bar without working up the nerve to talk to them about the whole damn circumstance.

(Of course she doesn’t wish that. Grotto needed help. More than that, someone needed to look into this, especially when the DA keeps dropping the ball. But Jesus Christ, she’s been on her feet for two days straight now and now she’s climbing up onto a rooftop that in all likelihood is being watched by police snipers, she’s not particularly happy and she is _allowed_ to be upset about it, okay?)

Kate’s waiting for them at the edge of one of the empty buildings, her bow strung, an arrow nocked. “No movement on the perimeter, but the cops are getting antsy. I think they’re gearing up for something.”

Kate’s glow-in-the-dark watch reads _9:24._ Darcy swallows. “You think they heard about the garage?”

“What garage?”

“Exactly,” Darcy says. “What do you think?”

“Circle around the back.” The zig-zagging crack down the Daredevil helmet makes her stomach cramp up. Like lightning, she thinks. Like a scar. _Hey, Harry Potter,_ and there should not be hysterical giggles bubbling up right now, that’s really not something she needs. “He’s probably going to try and sneak in through a hole in their monitoring. We’ll need to split up. Hawkeye—”

“I’ll take east,” Kate says, and presses comm buds into Darcy’s hand, buds and receivers alike. The receivers are little adhesive clingers, something that Kate had called a _subvocal-transmitter-whatever-thing_. She tugs down the collar of her suit, and sticks one of them to her throat. “Meet up two blocks over on the building with the Verizon Wireless store when you’re finished.”

“Fine.” Darcy hooks the thing into her ear.  “Be _careful._ ”

“Please,” Kate says. Then she settles on the window-sill, knocks an arrow, and fires. In the next second, she’s gone, swarming up the outside of the building like a spider, the rope hitching itself up behind her. _The shit Clint teaches her, I swear to God._ Matt turns to her, frowning.

“We’re not splitting up,” Darcy snaps. “That’s not happening.”

“It has to, we don’t have time to argue about it—” 

“M—no _._ Not after what happened earlier, not—”

“Lilith—”

“I told you, _n_ _o_. I’m not risking that.”

Matt opens his mouth, and stops. His head tips. “Incoming,” he says. She can’t see anything, when she looks out the window, but she trusts him. If Matt says there’s incoming, there’s incoming. He snags her wrist with one hand.

“We don’t have time,” he says again. “He could be anywhere and you know it. We don’t split up, we could lose him.”

And if they lose him, then that means Foggy and Karen could get caught in the crossfire. If they lose him, it could take days or weeks or months to find him again, and more people will die, and that’s more responsibility, that’s more weight on both of them, and they can’t let that happen. They _can’t_ let that happen. Darcy screeches between her teeth. “I hate you sometimes.”

“You don’t.”

“You keep pissing me off, we’ll see how it goes.” She twists her hand around, squeezes his arm hard enough to shift the bones. “You go west, I’ll go south.”

Matt’s lips thin out. He curls his fingers around her wrist, just for a moment. Then he’s gone, taking the stairs up to the roof two at a time, way too fast for her to feel anything other than nauseous. Darcy shifts her grip on the baton, and darts for the southern stairwell.

There are cops on her part of the roof. Of course there are cops on her part of the roof. She avoids the first two just by slinking behind them, careful to keep her boots from clicking on the concrete. The third guy, though, she has to whack in the back of the head—which she would feel more bad about, she thinks, if it weren’t for the fact that he had been sighting down his scope at Kate at the time. “There’s another one you owe me, Hawkeye,” she says, half under her breath, and through the comms Kate crackles a little.

“Please.”

“Vehicle coming in,” says Matt. Or Daredevil, she thinks. It’s Daredevil this time, rasping and deep. “North-east side.”

She doesn’t turn to look. Darcy swings herself over the edge of the building, and drops, seven feet down to the next one. The ankle that Jarhead had swept out from under her nearly caves. “Fuck.”

Matt’s voice snaps through the comms. “Okay?”

“I’m fine, pay attention to your own bullshit.”

There’s another cop on this rooftop, and there’s no way she’s going to get past him, not this time. The roof is bare except for the access door on the far side, and the walls, and she is _not_ about to swing herself over the side and skitter along like Ezio fucking Auditore. She twirls her baton, once, twice, and flies at him, dropping at the last possible second to skid along the roof and hook the baton against his legs. He drops, yipping like a terrier, and hits the ground hard enough to actually rattle. Darcy snaps up to her feet, and presses the tip of her baton into his throat.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” she says. “So I’d keep your mouth shut.”

The guy looks at her with huge eyes, and gropes for the second gun he has on his belt. He’s a cop, she thinks. She shouldn’t want to brain a cop. She whacks her baton over his helmet, and takes the edge of the roof at a run.

Down below is chaos. The team Reyes brought in is crawling all over the crashed semi, whipping around, shouting at each other. _Nothing here. Check in back._ Flames and yelling and _Foggy, Karen, where are they, if they’re not inside I swear to god I’m gonna kill them._ “Nothing on south.”

“Nothing to the west,” Daredevil says.

“I have him,” Kate says. “On the water tower. He hasn’t seen me. I can take out his rifle.”

“Don’t.” It’s Matt, not Darcy. Darcy can’t find the words. _Do it,_ she thinks. _Take the shot, kill him,_ which is not what Kate meant but it’s what she _wants,_ to watch him fall, to carve him apart, _but if he didn’t actually try to kill us, if he’s only after particular people, then why do I still—_ “You miss, and he’ll bolt. We can’t lose him.”

“I don’t miss,” Kate snaps. “I can do it, Daredevil.”

“And if you _do_ knock it out of his hands then the whole place starts shooting.” Matt hisses through his teeth. “I’m closest. Give me three minutes to get him down. Meet me at the base.”

“Don’t you dare,” Darcy says, but Daredevil’s gone silent. When she bolts to the edge of the building, she can see a dark figure slinging itself up the edge of the water tower, up and up and up. There’s a man standing on the roof, a sniper rifle to his cheek. “ _Wait_ , goddamn you—Hawkeye, take the shot!”

“Don’t do it, Hawkeye—”

“ _Take the_ _fucking shot_!”

“Lilith, look out!” Kate shouts, and a fist lands hard against Darcy’s jaw. She hits the ground and rolls, back, out of reach. Blood flecks on the rooftop. Down on the ground, people are swarming. _Matt. Matt and Foggy and Karen and Kate,_ and a woman standing on the rooftop, dressed in black, her hair twisted up into a ponytail and a mask pulled high up over her nose. Her gloved hands are curled into fists.

“You have to be kidding me right now,” Darcy says. “You could not have picked a _worse_ time for this.”

Kudos to her, the woman in the mask doesn’t say a word. She just lunges.

She’s balletic. This isn’t Jarhead and his constant, overwhelming bulldozer of brutality; this is a woman on her toes, back and forth, little stinging jabs, acrobatic whirls. _This_ is something she can fight. Kate’s shouting in her ear, but Darcy can’t make out the words; she has her baton, and the woman’s bare-handed, and this is a style she knows, this is a person who isn’t a fucking machine, and _I can fight this. I have to win this._ Matt’s being an idiot ( _you promised me, goddamn you, you promised me_ ) and she has to go make sure he doesn’t get himself nearly killed, _again,_ for the second time in twenty-four hours. Darcy whips the baton into the woman’s ribs and she goes into a one-handed cartwheel to take the sting off. _A gymnast and acrobat and a fucking ninja, Jesus, I didn’t even hear her coming_ —

She’s strong, for her weight and her size and her stature. When she drives a fist into Darcy’s side, it almost knocks the breath out of her. Above the mask, the woman’s eyes crinkle. She’s close enough that when she blinks, Darcy can almost see her eyelashes lacing together. Over her shoulder, Matt and Jarhead have vanished from sight.

“Not as good as I heard,” she says.

“It’s been a long day.” Darcy rocks back and forth on her feet. No sign of Matt, no sign of Jarhead, no sign of Kate. “Did I step on your toes on a subway platform or are you with Yosemite Sam over there?”

“Who?” says the woman, and drops. Darcy just barely manages to skip back out of the way of the sweep. Side to side and back up again, and she’s faster this time, her strikes are harder, smoother, like she’s shaken off some kind of weight or hesitation and _shit, that’s a knife_ —

The blade screeches over the metal coating of the baton. Which is very not friendly of Miss Ninja, first of all, and also a terrible sound. The woman slashes at her again, and again, and the third time Darcy snags her wrist and twists it backwards, angling, forcing it out of her hand. When she hits the button on the baton, it jabs forward into Miss Ninja’s ribs, and knocks the breath out of her. “Back,” Kate snaps, and Darcy leaps away before an arrow sprouts from the concrete, two. Then the guns go off, and she drops. The police have caught on to the fact that they have _two_ vigilante fights going on in the same hundred yard radius. Bullets ping off the edge of the roof. Miss Ninja hisses between her teeth, and then slings herself over the edge of the roof, arching like someone leaping over a balance beam. By the time Darcy looks over the edge after her, she’s gone.

“Jesus, I can’t take you anywhere,” Kate pants into the comms. “I’m coming over there; I think Daredevil and Sniper Boy fell through a window, I can’t see them anywhere.”

 _No, not again, not again, Jesus Christ—_ “Go help him, not me—”

“He’s not the one in the middle of a war zone right now,” Kate snaps, and Darcy shuts up. Another arrow lands hard in the rooftop, and starts to smoke. “Cover your nose and get out of sight, go, go go go—”

The access door is blocked. There is, however, a window even with her rooftop, maybe four feet between the buildings. _Oh my god, am I actually—oh my god._ Darcy presses her hand to her nose and mouth, trying to breathe through the smoke. She paces in a tight circle, heart in her throat. Then she backs up, three bouncing steps, and bolts for the edge, because _I hate heights, I hate heights, I really, really, really hate heights and if I actually think about what I’m doing I’m going to throw up because oh God oh God oh God_ —

She jumps. There’s a single, surging, terrifying moment of weightlessness. Then she hits the glass hard, shattering it inwards. She turns her face, but a shard still streaks a cut over her cheek. Darcy hits the ground and rolls, keeps on running. “Daredevil, can you hear me?”

No answer.

“Where were they?” She seizes the railing, and whips herself down into the emergency stairwell. “Hawkeye, what building?”

“The cops are crawling all over it, Lilith, you can’t go there—”

“ _What building_?”

“Lilith—”

“Not sure you can hear this,” says a voice, and Darcy stops dead, skidding, nearly tripping over her shoes and tumbling right down a full flight of stairs. It’s caverns and dripping caves and stone, hoarse and regulated and raw, and _Jesus fucking Christ._ “Haven’t seen one of these in a while. Sub-vocal comm, high-end but not military. But it’s here, which means somebody’s gotta be listening, right?”

“Jesus,” says Kate, but Darcy shushes her.

“This is Cat,” says Jarhead. “Isn’t it? We met at the hospital. Relax; if there _is_ an audio receiver rattling around in this bike helmet somewhere, then I don’t care enough to go check. Not like he can hear you right now, anyway. He’s gonna sleep for a while longer.” Pause. “Must be having one hell of a headache.”

“Lilith—”

“Be quiet, Hawkeye.”

“Me and Red, we need to have a talk.” There’s a thunk, like he’s dropped from some height, a clatter of weight and movement. “And you and me, too, to be honest, the three of us, we all need to have a bit of a reconnoiter, y’know. A nice chat. What I’m thinking is, this little transmitter, ‘snot big enough to have any kind of tracking system, so, here’s the plan: when Red here starts looking like he’s gonna open his eyes up again, I’ll give you a holler on this thing. And then the three of us—the three of us, Cat, not your little birdy friend, not anyone else you can scrounge up out of nowhere, just you, me, and Headache Red—we can have our little heart-to-heart.”

She can’t answer. There’s no way _to_ answer. She can hear Jarhead breathing. Then there’s a click, and silence. She thinks he might have put the transmitter inside of something. There are noises, but they’re muffled, echoey, too faint to make out detail. Little rattles and bangs. Kate swallows, audibly.

“Darcy,” she says. Darcy should be shouting at her, for using real names over comms, but she can’t find the words. “Darcy, what do we do?”

She’s cold.


	4. Down, Down, Down

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning for: EXTREMELY dark thought processes, self-harm (hitting a wall until bleeding; think Sun in _Sense8_ ), canon-typical violence.
> 
> This might be the darkest Darcy's ever gone in anything I've ever written her in and she legit frightened me.
> 
> Also! This will probably be the only chapter in this fic that will have Matt POV that is more than a conversation with vague asides. So. Y'know. Apologies for going over some of the same material from canon, but I think I've switched things up enough that it shouldn't be boring or irritating to read through. 
> 
> Claire deserves all the awards. So does Kate. Matt needs a kick in the pants. 
> 
> (Chapel, seriously, thank you again, so much.)
> 
> NOTE: TO ANYONE WHO MAY BE SEEING THIS IN ALL ITALICS, I'M TRYING TO FIX IT. AO3 glitched on me.

“I think,” Foggy says, “that I might be sick.”

Even compared to last night, the hospital is actually nearly overflowing with people. ‘Bangers, she thinks, for the most part, watching a guy handcuffed to a rolling stretcher rattle by, cursing out his nurses. Grotto’s back in the hospital, because like an idiot, he’d managed to pop all his stitches trying to run away from all the shit that went down in the yard. The only reason he’s still in their custody is because Karen had managed to catch up with him and talk him down from bolting off into the night, no thanks to Reyes and her Supreme Mishandling of Extraordinary Bullshit. He’s still cuffed to his own little hospital bed, because “like hell are you keeping me in here again, get me out of the fucking hospital, he walked right in last time—” but at least he’s, you know. Here. And alive. 

_More than I can say for Matt._

( _He said he was going to call when Matt woke up, he’s alive, Jarhead’s not gonna kill him, not yet, you have to remember that—)_

“Don’t be sick on me,” Kate says, and hands Foggy a paper cup of coffee. The waiting room is cramped and awful and smells like smoke, and she wants to curl into a ball and scream. Christ. Darcy draws her knees up against her chest, and nearly hides her face in them. Karen touches a hand to her back, and pets at her, awkwardly. She has to fight the urge to bare her teeth and snap at Karen’s fingers. “You throw up on the floor they’re gonna throw you into the ER too and I don’t think you want to be in there right now.” 

“Yeah, no, I can do without that.” Foggy makes a face at the coffee, and then says, “But seriously, I think I’m gonna be sick.” 

“We’re not talking about this here,” Karen says. 

"I didn’t say anything.” Foggy shuts up when a nurse goes by, staring at her clipboards and cursing under her breath. “Should the pair of you even be here after what happened last night? Don’t you think one of the nurses will recognize you?” 

( _Bang_. It won’t get out of her head. _Bang_.) 

“This is the ER, not the ICU.” It’s the first thing Darcy’s been able to say in an hour, and it makes Kate stop in the middle of her swallow of coffee, watching over the rim of her cup with the same cool steadiness of a sniper. “And they’ve seen a million faces in here today. Nobody will care.” 

“That’s true, but—” 

Karen reaches behind Darcy’s back, and touches her fingertips to Foggy’s shoulder. He closes his mouth, and goes quiet. It’s too close in here, too loud. She wants to be outside, listening to the city, moving, running. _I’ll give you a holler_ , Jarhead had said. It’s been an hour. If Matt hasn’t woken up yet, how long is it going to take? She touches her fingers to the bud in her ear, and shuts her eyes. “Nobody cares,” she says again, and clambers off the chair. “I’m going to the bathroom.” 

“Want me to come?” Kate says, lightly, but there’s a hawkish look on her face that really shouldn’t be there. It’s the first thing Kate’s said to her since Matt was taken, and it pricks at her like a scorpion. _Hawkeye, Kate, they’re one and the same_ , like how Lilith and Darcy are one and the same, and Matt and the Devil are one and the same, and does the Punisher have a name? Does she care? Not now. 

_This is Cat, isn’t it?_

“I’m not going to run off,” Darcy snaps. “I’m going to the bathroom and then I’m going to call Brett and get on his ass about this fucking safehouse, so just—I’m not going anywhere." 

Kate takes another sip of her coffee. “All right, then.” 

“Darcy,” Foggy says, but Darcy’s already stalked off towards the bathroom. 

The women’s restroom is crammed full on this floor, people who have come in with different patients all trying to settle in for a private breakdown, so she jabs the elevator button a few times before slamming into the emergency stairwell. It’s quieter in here, and the temperature difference—shit. It’s actually tangible. It has to be cracking a hundred degrees in the emergency room, what with so many bodies crammed in there. By all rights the stairwell should be the same, but it seems like a lot of air conditioners seem to be venting right in here and keeping it chilled. Nobody else is around. She fists her hands up, lets them loose again. She doesn’t actually have to pee, or anything, she just needs to be somewhere that has nothing to do with people, right now. 

_You broke your fucking promise, you asshole_. 

He’d promised her. He’d _promised her_ he wouldn’t go after Jarhead on his own, not when his head was so bad, not when he was already barely keeping his feet, and the first thing he does when he’s out of her line of sight is go after the bastard like a honey badger. _You promised me, you son of a bitch_ , she can’t actually speak for how angry she is with him right now, and now Jarhead has Matt, and Matt could wind up dead, and this is the second time in two days she’s had to sit and watch something happen and not be able to stop it, and she’s going to be sick. Every muscle in her body is twisting, working themselves into knots. She wants to run. She wants to _scream_. It keeps building up in her chest and bubbling in her mouth, and every time she speaks she comes closer to the edge. It’s a miracle she hasn’t killed someone yet. They’re all grating, every one of them, every voice, every word, every breath she hears, because she shouldn’t have to be here, goddammit, this never should have happened, she should have made him stay at the apartment and keep his head down and do this herself, she should have realized, she should have figured it out, she should have been _better_ — 

( _Bang_ , and Matt drops, and then the voice in her ear again, _this is Cat, isn’t it_ , and they could be anywhere in the city and she can’t do a thing—) 

She needs to get out. She needs to be moving. She starts to pace, back and forth on the landing of the emergency stairwell, around and around in tight circles until the world is spinning. There’s no reason for Jarhead to come after Grotto, not when he has Matt somewhere, not when he has to make sure Matt won’t wake up and get away, but who knows what he’ll do, this creature that Daredevil and Lilith might have made possible, who knows what’ll come out of the head of this warped child of their dreams and their monstrosities? She can’t predict him. She can’t think. _Take the shot_ , and Kate hadn’t, and they’d fallen, and Foggy had said there was blood on the floor where they’d dropped, and _he could be dead, what are you doing sitting here, why are you trapped here, just go, what are you thinking, Darcy—_

She can’t take this anymore. Darcy balls her hands up into fists, and slams one of them into the hard concrete of the wall, once, again, and again. Blood smears over her knuckles, leaves a little mark against the wall. “Fuck.” It cracks out of her, broken. “Fucking dammit, _god fucking dammit_ —” 

Again and again and again and she shouldn’t be here, right now, she shouldn’t have to be here, but she can’t leave Foggy and Karen alone. She can’t do it, not right now. The skin on her knuckles has split, smearing red down her fingers. She hits the wall again, leaves another mark. She shouldn’t be here, she should be out looking for Matt, she _needs_ to look for Matt, but she can’t focus, can’t think; there’s nowhere she can go without getting herself lost, and nothing she can do but wait, and the hate inside her is an actual living, breathing thing. This is fury mixed with terror mixed with loathing, this is hurt and this is panic and this is helplessness, her blood turning to shards of ice inside her skin, her head roaring, a taste like copper pipe on her tongue and barely feeling it when she smears blood on the wall of the stairwell. “ _Fuck_ ,” she says again, and it’s a scream, echoing up and down and all through the stairwell like she’s trapped in a canyon. It tears at her throat. “ _Fuck_!” 

( _You promised me you wouldn’t go after him alone, you promised that you’d always come back_ —) 

Echoing. The whole world is echoing. _Take the shot_. She should have made Kate take the shot. She shouldn’t have let Matt go off alone. She hits the wall again, and again, and blood leaves a print behind like a bruise. Matt should have kept his fucking promise, not done the stupid reckless awful thing of ignoring her and jumping in and doing whatever the hell he thought he was doing, getting even or putting himself between the Punisher and a bullet or whatever the fuck it was, whatever hero complex bullshit that he still holds so close, and she should have been able to stop it. She should be able to _trust him_ not to do this shit, not have to fight him every step of the way, she should be able to trust him, and just—shit. She can’t breathe, right now. She can’t breathe, she can’t think. Her mind spins in circles, and there’s a spot in the center of her chest that’s knotted up like ice, frosty fingers scraping over her insides, spreading farther and farther and farther. 

_She should have taken the fucking shot_. 

“Whoa, hey,” says a voice, and then Karen’s caught her wrist, tight between her fingers. She nearly throws Karen over her shoulder to the landing, nearly screams. “Darcy, Jesus, you’re going to break your hand if you keep doing that—” 

“Let me go, Karen.” 

Karen’s eyes narrow. She digs her nails in. “No.” 

"Let _go_.” Her hand is throbbing, but at a distance, like it’s someone else’s body, like there’s something muffling all sensation. Blood drips from her fingers. “Karen, let me go, I swear to God—” 

"What are you gonna do if I don’t, hurt me?” She yanks hard on Darcy’s wrist. It tugs at the hole in her shoulder, cracks the scab. Under the gauze, she thinks she might be bleeding. “Is that what we do to each other now? Scream and yell and dig in until we rip each other apart?” 

“ _Let go of me_ , Karen!” 

“Not unless you make me,” she says, and Darcy almost does it. She almost wrenches Karen forward, almost whips her around and slams her into the wall and yanks her arm up behind her back. Almost breaks. Karen stares at her, a dare, a threat. “Make me,” she says again, and Darcy squeezes her hand into a fist, and does nothing. There’s red trickling down her wrist to run over Karen’s fingers. 

“Shit.” Her eyes burn. “Fucking shit.” 

Karen doesn’t let go. Her grip loosens, a little. It still feels like it’s going to bruise. “He’s not dead, Darcy. Kate told me what Castle said.” 

Darcy wets her lips. Her mouth is dry, cracking inside. “Castle?” 

“That’s his name.” She presses her lips together. “The Punisher. I heard Tower and Jen talking, in the bunker. His name is Frank Castle.” 

Frank Castle. Jarhead, the Punisher. Frank Castle. _Don’t give him a name_ , Darcy thinks. _Don’t give him a name when I want him dead more than ever. Don’t remind me he’s human, Karen_. Karen’s nails pinch back into the soft skin of her wrist, by her pulse. 

“He’s not dead,” Karen says again. “Matt isn’t dead. And there’s nothing—there is absolutely nothing any of us can do right now except stick together, and make sure Grotto gets somewhere safe, and wait for this bastard to contact you. There is _nothing else_ we can do.” 

“I can’t sit here.” It’s an echo in her mouth, déjà vu. “I can’t sit here and wait, not right now, I can’t, Karen, I can’t just—” 

“It’s not a question of can or should, Darcy, you _have to_. We need you here to make sure nothing happens. You can’t crisscross all over the city looking for Matt, all that’ll do is exhaust you and make things worse and there’s no way we can protect Grotto if someone comes in after him, not without you. So right now—” She swallows. “I need you to focus, okay? We all need you to focus. I know how hard that sounds—” 

“You have no idea!” 

“What do you think it was like for us when Nobu grabbed you?” Her nails bite again. “Do you think I don’t know what this feels like? Do you think I don’t have any idea? With Nobu, we didn’t know, we had no idea if you were dead or not, we had nowhere to start and no guarantee you were ever coming back alive or whole or any of it, and we fell apart. You have _no idea_ what it was like to wait for that, and then again, when Fisk tried to kill you, we called and called and you didn’t pick up, and just—” Her eyes are overbright, tears clinging to the lashes. “Darcy, you nearly died, _because of me_. Fisk tried to kill you for what I did, because you took the fall for me and for Ben and told him you’d been the one to do it, so don’t tell me I don’t have any idea what it’s like to be stuck somewhere completely ignorant and not be able to do anything to change it!” 

There’s nothing Darcy can say to that. She pulls her wrist out of Karen’s fingers, and lets her hand drop. Blood spatters on the floor. Karen gulps for air, and touches the tips of her fingers to her eyes, wiping away tears that haven’t fallen yet. It smears a bit of Darcy’s blood over the skin of her cheek. She doesn’t notice. 

“I’m not in love with Matt, so—so yeah, I don’t know what it feels like to have the person you love most taken away from you. But don’t tell me I don’t know how it feels to not be able to do something when someone who matters to you is in trouble. And don’t you dare ask me to stand here and let you hurt yourself, because I won’t, Darcy. Don’t you ever ask me to do that again.” 

She should want to cry, at that, she thinks. The crackling in her chest could be something important. She looks down at her hand, at the torn skin and the dark red welling up, trailing down her fingers. 

“Karen—” It’s a rasp, a husky thing, a bursting eggshell. “He promised me. He said he wouldn’t go after the bastard alone. He made me a promise, and he didn’t keep it, and I—” 

She stops. She doesn’t know what she can say, after that. 

“Then when we get him back, you can rip his head off for it. You _should_ rip his head off for it. It shouldn’t have to take five people to keep Matt Murdock from doing something stupid, even if he’s been knocked silly more times in the past year than he probably has brain cells.” Karen looks at her for a moment, and then digs something out of her purse. More Kleenex. She folds it up, layers it, and then very carefully she takes Darcy’s wrist again, and presses the wad down over her knuckles. The sting still isn’t quite real. “We wait. And while we wait, we get Grotto somewhere safe. All right?” 

She can’t speak anymore. Darcy nods, and closes her eyes. When Karen shifts, puts her arms around Darcy and draws her close, she can’t move. It’s only when Karen threads her fingers into her hair that something starts to shatter. Darcy heaves a breath, and then two, and hides her face in Karen’s shoulder. She can’t bring herself to hug her back. If she clings, she’ll crack. If she speaks, she’ll run. 

“We have to wait,” Karen says, half a whisper. “All we can do is wait.” 

_No wonder the silence makes people go insane_ , she thinks, and keeps her mouth shut. 

“Come on.” Karen draws back. “We should get your hand looked at by someone who actually has some idea of what they’re doing.” 

.

.

.

The phone rings. 

"This is Ben Urich.” 

“You need to look into Reyes.” 

“Who is this?” 

“You have to. Everything she touches turns sour. You need to look into her. You need to expose her for what she is, or a lot of people are gonna wind up dead.” 

“You’re the one who emailed me earlier, aren’t you? You’re the one who was talking about Elliot Grote. Tell me somewhere I can meet you, we should be talking about this face to face—” 

“You think I don’t know what happens to the people who talk to you, Ben Urich? We get crushed.” 

“Not all of them.” 

“Just—look into Samantha Reyes. Look into it.”

“I’ve heard a lot of shit about Samantha Reyes since she started as DA. Something that broad isn’t gonna help me at all. You have to give me something more specific.” 

Silence. 

“Is this about that guy? The Punisher? The one who’s been treating the city like a game of _Call of Duty: Black Ops_? Is that what this is about?” 

Silence. 

“You have to give me something. Give me anything. A name.” 

"Castle,” says the voice. “That’s your name. Frank Castle.” 

"Who’s Frank Castle?” 

"You’re not gonna hear from me again.” 

A dial tone. 

.

.

.

It’s not Claire, who treats her. She keeps catching little glimpses of Claire wandering in and out of the ER, more and more stressed, more and more exhausted, snapping and snarling at ‘bangers to keep them in their places. Instead, it’s a nurse none of them have met before, a tiny Indian woman named Parvati with the softest voice Darcy’s ever heard. She doesn’t ask what happened, or how someone in the waiting room has been shifted over to someone who needs first aid (not ER stuff, definitely not, but still; she’s bleeding on their floor and she’s pretty sure that nurses don’t enjoy seeing that very much). She just wraps Darcy’s hand in a bandage as best she can, weaving it between her fingers, and then she herds them all into the waiting room again and disappears, here and then gone, half a shadow. 

Darcy’s numb. She kind of watches it happen from far away, the treatment and the vanishing, doesn’t speak. Karen answers the few questions Parvati has, mostly with _no, she’s fine_ and _it’s been a very long day_. (Parvati tapes the glass cut on her face closed, too, and her cheek trills a little when they dab alcohol onto it. Her heart is pounding, but at a distance. Everything hurts.) _Wait_ , she thinks. _Watch_. Eventually she stands, and starts to pace. The movement helps, a little. She can’t focus, but she can’t keep still, either. _Wait and watch_. Grotto’s twitchy as hell when the nurses finally let them through to talk to him, five minutes only, and he looks truly pathetic with his wrist handcuffed to the bed like basically everyone else in the ward. 

“Shouldn’t be too much longer, Grotto.” 

“Should’ve let me run while I had the chance,” Grotto says, and not-so-subtly tests the give of his handcuffs again. “That bastard’s going to come back and get me.” 

_Let him_ , Darcy thinks. She could seize Grotto by the hair and ram his head into the railing, shut him up. _You’re why this all started_. Grotto and Reyes and her terrifying, reckless ineptitude, her grasping greed, her rash carelessness about who winds up caught in the crossfire. _Samantha Reyes, District Attorney_. She could slam Grotto’s head into the railing and knock him out, because this is what Jarhead wants, isn’t it? He wants Grotto dead. 

_No_. She curls her fingers around the rail of the bed. _No. Get it together_. She’s not that person. She’s _not_ that person. She can’t be that person. She won’t be the monster here. She can’t. 

( _Matt, where are you_?) 

Grotto’s watching her, and his lips are white. At the end of the bed, Kate’s jaw is clenched. “Jesus,” he says. “Jesus, what the fuck is wrong with you?" 

“Shut up,” Darcy snaps, and slams out of the emergency room. 

After a minute or two, Karen and Kate follow. They bracket her on either side, and she can’t work out if it’s meant to be a flanking, or a precaution. _Keep Darcy from falling apart_ or _keep Darcy going off the rails and smashing our client’s head through a wall_. She crosses her legs at the knee, starts bouncing one. Foggy’s stayed behind, trailing Claire across the emergency room. Through the glass in the door, she can see them hissing in low voices, whispering back and forth. About her, maybe. Or about Matt, who knows. Karen’s chewing on her fingernails, and for once Darcy doesn’t try to stop her. Kate blows air, spitting like a whale. 

“Not much longer,” she says, pressed up into Darcy’s side. “Right?” 

Ten-fifty. She stops moving, all at once. Both Kate and Karen watch her like she’s a bomb. “I’m gonna call Brett, see where the hell he is.” 

When she stands, Karen reaches out, hooks her fingers around Darcy’s wrist again. The touch burns into her bones. “Darcy—” 

“I’ll be back in three minutes."

She actually has to pull her wrist away. Karen drops her hand to her lap, and watches her go. 

Cell phone use isn’t allowed in any of the major wards, so she has to wander all the way outside before she can finally dial Brett. It rings out twice. For the first time in nearly a week, the air doesn’t stick to her like porridge. _It’s cooling off_. Slowly but surely. It’s still unbearable, but there are storm clouds rolling in from the East River, faraway but creeping closer, smoky and yellow with the light of the city. She could break off, now, she thinks, start running, but if she does then she won’t stop. Pick up the phone, Brett. He doesn’t. It’s probably better that he doesn’t. If she actually had to speak to Brett right now—well. Who knows. She’s not sure. She doesn’t want to talk to Brett. She wants to dig her nails into her own skin and rip. 

She leaves a message, clipped and curt—“I’d really like to know that my client isn’t going to wind up eating a shotgun barrel in the next twenty-four hours, so let me know when the safe house is ready, will you?”—before she leans against the wall, and stares at the sky. _I need to scream. I need to scream, right now, but there’s nowhere I can scream where people won’t come running. And if I start, I won’t stop_. The screen of her phone glows bluish in the yellow light of the street lamp. A tweet comes in from the #samsonanddelilahofhell tag. Then another from Hero Watch. Darcy blinks at the screen of her phone, at the uncracked glass and the carefully maintained shell—no more bananas, this time, just a plain black flip cover with stars on the inside—and then she shoves it back into her hoodie pocket. The city smells like someone’s died, like there’s a body rotting underneath the streets, and the comm is cold and dead in her ear. 

Her knuckles ache when she folds her hand back into a fist.

.

.

.

**Hero Watch (@maskwatchnyc)** : Anyone hear from @theangelofmercy tonight? Kitchen’s been noisy and she hasn’t responded. 

**Hijabibabi (@betsysy)** : @maskwatchnyc Leave her alone, for once, you vultures 

**Alias Investigations (@aliasinvestig)** : @maskwatchnyc how about you fuck off and let the woman do her job 

**RooKate (@archersdoitbetter)** : @maskwatchnyc maybe back the fuck off her and she’ll answer when she’s ready 

**Hero Watch (@maskwatchnyc)** : @betsysy @aliasinvestig @archersdoitbetter No need to get offended, it was just a question. 

**RooKate (@archersdoitbetter)** : @maskwatchnyc BRO YOU DID NOT JUST “SIT DOWN, YOUNG LADY” ME 

**RooKate (@archersdoitbetter)** : @maskwatchnyc YOU WANNA FUCKIN GO 

.

.

.

They only realize after the completely heart-stopping, nerve-shredding moment of Foggy talking two rowdy ‘bangers back down into silence (and the only reason she isn’t in there, between him and them, between Foggy and danger, is because Kate has her nails digging so deep into the skin of Darcy’s arm that she leaves scabs behind, and Karen’s blocking her on the other side, and _please, please, please don’t make me watch this, please let me help, please let me break something_ ) that Grotto is gone. 

“He must have used the argument breaking out as a cover.” Kate clatters the now-empty cuffs against the side of the bed, and scowls. “Goddammit. This is your job,” she snaps at the nearest security guard, “ _your_ job, not ours—” 

“Leave him alone, Kate,” Darcy says. She sounds very unlike herself, low and harsh. “He has his hands full right now, same as the rest of us.” 

“How the hell did he even get out of this?” Foggy looks more pissed than scared, thankfully. She can’t deal with a scared Foggy right now. “The thing’s still connected.” 

“Maybe he’s double-jointed, I don’t know. He can’t have managed to get very far.” Karen bites her lip. “I’m going to check outside. Kate, go towards the western doors, see if he tried to sneak out through another ward. Foggy, Darcy, you go the other way. He might try for the emergency exit.” 

“He’s probably gone,” Foggy says. “There might not be any point.” 

“Yeah, well, I’ll agree with that when I can’t find him.” 

“Karen,” Darcy says, because Christ, not alone, she’s not sure if anyone will come after Grotto and Karen can’t go alone, “maybe you shouldn’t—” 

“Don’t,” Karen says, in a sharp voice, and stalks off. Kate’s eyes dart from Darcy to Karen, and then she snaps to, bolting west before Darcy can get a hand on her and keep her still. There’s a new scratch on the sleeve of her leather jacket, and it makes her look scarred. Darcy turns and walks away without looking at Foggy. His shoes scrape against the linoleum when he tries to catch up. 

“Slow down, Darcy, Jesus.” 

“Everything that’s happened over the past few days has been because of this son of a bitch, I’m not about to let him walk out on us and get himself killed when everything has been because of him.” _I’m not letting anyone else I love get hurt because of him_. She has to find him first. She slams into the emergency stairwell again, and hangs over the railing, listening. Nothing. Silence. Back into the hallway. “This fucking bastard—” 

“Hey, Cat.” 

Darcy freezes, one hand on her hip, the bandaged one clenching up against her side. Next to her, Foggy stills, and turns. “What?” 

She presses her fingers into her ear, and says nothing. 

“Nothin’ to report, yet.” Castle, she thinks. His name is Castle. _Jarhead. Punisher. Don’t remember he has a name, Darcy. Don’t do it_. “Still sleeping, your boy Red. Just had a question for you. Though it’s not like you can answer me. Like talking to a ghost, isn’t it. All you can do is listen. Some people get paid for this.” 

“Darcy,” Foggy says, very hushed. “Darcy, what is it?” 

“Let me listen,” she snaps, and turns away. The first door she finds—and Christ, this is déjà vu too, this is someplace she never thought she’d come back to—is the break room. The _Caution: Hazardous Materials_ sign is still pasted to the fridge. She shuts the door behind her and starts to lock it, but then Foggy pushes his way in after her. He’s the one to snap the lock. 

“Interesting work you did with the helmet.” She sinks down into a chair. Her heart’s been impossible to hear for hours, but now—now it’s too loud. Now she can barely catch anything over the beat. “Can see where I cracked off on him, other night. Fresh welding. Who does that, who does your fashion work? You do it? Seems military grade. Close enough, maybe. Fixed it damn fast, but the thing’s probably like an eggshell. Could crack it apart with one good hit.” He muses. “Wanted to ask you. Why Lilith?” 

Darcy bites her tongue. At the same time, Foggy reaches out, and seizes her hand, wrapping it up tight in his. It feels like he’s tethering her to earth. The rest of her is a whirlwind, shrieking. She wants to rip the world apart. 

“Daredevil,” says Castle. “Daredevil and _Lilith_. The Devil of Hell’s Kitchen and _Lilith_. Name you gave yourself. Red, here—dunno. Hell of a name, Devil of Hell’s Kitchen, but the papers started that one, from what I can tell. Lilith, though. Didn’t know about her for a long time. Nobody talks about Lilith. But you picked it. Figured it must mean something.” 

“Cut the bullshit,” Darcy says, quietly. He can’t hear her, but she doesn’t care. “Cut the bullshit, you bastard, give me something—” 

“Guy I knew once told me about her.” There’s a click, and then the unmistakable sound of a racking gun. Her heartbeat drops away again into silence. ( _Bang_.) “Lilith. Made of the same mud as Adam. God said, _it is not good for man to be alone_. But the guy I knew, he told me Lilith didn’t want any of God’s shit. That she refused to submit to Adam, refused to say she was anything less. Left the Garden, left Adam, left all of it, made her own way. He said, people think of her as the mother of demons, now, but at the beginning, way back at the start, she was just a woman who wouldn’t be told what to do.” 

Castle falls quiet again. She can hear Kate breathing, she thinks; there are hospital noises coming through that don’t match up with the soft windy echo of wherever Castle is hiding. 

“Think there’s something about this that you get that he doesn’t.” Castle sounds muffled, now, like he’s talking through something. “He doesn’t see it, or doesn’t want to see it. Doesn’t like to look at it. But you, you might see it better than him. Lilith the witch wanted me dead. Still want me dead, Cat? Took you a bit, but you wanted it. Coasted me along the ribs like you were trying to cut me open. Fire like that doesn’t cool off. Burns hotter the longer it lasts. Red, here, not so sure about him. I’m wondering what he does, you know, goes home, takes off the suit, lives his own life, turns away from the shit and the blood and the terror so he won’t see it—” 

“Shut up,” Darcy snaps, and Foggy squeezes her hand so tight it shakes. “You don’t know anything, you don’t know _anything_ , so shut up, you bastard, shut up—” 

“—but you—you came at me out of the suit, same way. That was you in the hallway, wasn’t it? The woman in the rose-colored glasses.” There’s another click, and he comes through clear again. “Don’t care who you are, Cat. Don’t care who he is. I don’t give a shit. But that trash you’re protecting? He’s a murderer. He murdered a whole family two years ago, ‘cause they wouldn’t pay off whatever racket the Brannigans had them roped in.” 

She’s going to throw up. She’s actually going to throw up. “That’s a lie.” 

“You can look it up,” he says, like he can hear her. “Old man who couldn’t pay the right people. Grotto was in deep with one of the Brannigans, owed a favor for a favor. So he shot the guy in cold blood. Lafayette Street. And when the old lady came out of the back bedroom and saw it, he killed her too. And there were two kids, teenagers. All of them blown away. The only reason the twelve-year-old survived was because she was sleeping at a friend’s house that night.” A dead, awful silence. Then: “You still think a piece of shit like that is worth protecting?” 

On the other end of the comms, Kate gags. 

“The pair of you wander the city,” he says. “You take out symptoms of the disease but leave the root set deep. Back and forth, always letting it live, the scum, creeping back out of the dark. You ever think about how many people are dead because of you? Because the pair of you could never work up the courage to finish the job? Came after me because you wanted to stop me burning it out. Figured you’d be easy to deal with. Couple of kids, no idea what you’re doing, not enough guts to end it. But you wanted to kill me, Cat,” says Castle. She closes her eyes. “I could tell, with Red. He never aimed like he meant it. Never tried to shut me down for good. But you did.” He stops. “Could be because of what I did, maybe, but I don’t think it is. Think it’s something in you. You’re only half-grown, Cat. Think you could go further, if you wanted.” 

_Bang_. 

“You don’t know me,” Darcy says, very quiet, very level, a voice beyond Lilith, far beyond, nails on a chalkboard and knives slid between ribs, cold and dark and awful. Next to her, Foggy flinches. “You don’t know anything about me, you son of a fucking bitch.” 

Like he’s heard her, Castle scoffs. “If you ain’t looking for Red right now, you should start,” he says. “Think he’s gonna be waking up soon. Though he’s gonna have a hard time getting up. Not gonna be happy about it when he finds out.” He rolls the words around his mouth. “Talk to you soon, Cat.” 

There’s a mug of cold coffee on the table. She can’t look away from it, for some reason. Words, embossed on the side. _World’s No. 1 Aunt_. She wants to slam her hand into it, knock it flying, shatter it against the wall. Flip the table, smash the chair. Dismantle it. Break everything. Burn the world. Destroy it. Get her teeth set in something and tear. 

Foggy’s still holding on to her hand. 

“Matt?” he says. 

_He’s gonna have a hard time getting up_. 

“Nothing.” Darcy watches his fingers. “Still asleep. Let go.” 

“Darcy, whatever he said—” Foggy’s voice cracks. “Whatever he said to you, you know it wasn’t true, right? You know he was just trying to freak you out.” 

_No_. It stings at her lips, burns her with frost. _No, all of that was true_. All of it had been true. 

_Still want me dead, Cat?_

Fisk had taken her, and tried to kill her, and Matt had wanted him dead. Castle’s tried to kill Matt—or even if he didn’t, he could have, the bullet came so close, so close, all the could-have-beens, and Castle wouldn’t have cared if he died—and now he’s taken him, and Darcy— 

_Think there’s something about this that you get that he doesn’t._

_You don’t have a clue what you’re dealing with, you son of a bitch._

“Let go, Foggy,” she says, still in that cold voice. It doesn’t echo, anymore. It’s immediate, the sense of it. Ice on her tongue. Cold fire up her spine. The slippery danger of black ice, staring out at her from a human face, with a broken nose and a shotgun held loose in one hand. “I’m fine.” 

_You’re only half-grown, Cat. Think you could go further, if you wanted._

Further where? Further from Matt? Step out over the ledge they keep each other clinging to, the barrier between what they try to be and what they try to keep themselves from becoming? _I want to kill him_. It’s never been truer. She wants Frank Castle dead. He’s a person, he’s a human being, he’s a criminal and a murderer and a monster, and she wants him dead. She wants him dead for what he did to Matt, for what could have happened, for the crack of the gun, _bang_ , and the end of the world. She wants him dead for this, for looking right through her and reading her and ripping her apart, thirty seconds and an epiphany, things he never should have been able to pick up about her, knowing things he never should have known. 

_Think it’s something in you_. 

(Heat and humidity clinging to her skin, the knife cold in her hand, the chill of the knob against her palm, and the thought of it, Eli, his eyes flaring wide, the blood on the floor, the muffled sounds when the belt had come down, and _you killed him, my best friend, you killed him and I want you dead_ and it's nearly happening all over again—) 

Fisk had said something like this, hadn’t he? That they were similar. That they were alike. All inverted reflections, distorted images of each other, mirrors cracked and filthy with grime, all smeared with the same thing. She looks at Foggy’s hand, clenched tight around hers. And Foggy had been right, back then. She’s nothing like Fisk. She doesn’t kill people just because they’re in her way. She doesn’t try to kill. She doesn’t see people as nothing. When she hates, it’s personal. When she hates, it’s a cyclone. 

_If you kill someone_ , she’d said to Matt, _it’ll kill you_. 

_Still want me dead, Cat?_

“Darcy,” Foggy says again. She blinks at him, slowly. “It was a lie, Darcy, all right? He was trying to psych you out, trying to get you to do something stupid. You can’t believe him, whatever it was. You _can’t_.” 

“Burns hotter the longer it lasts,” she says. Does that mean it gets worse? She can already barely breathe through the smoke. 

“What?” 

“Nothing.” She stands, and his fingers slip away. “I’m—Grotto’s getting away. We—we need to track that little bastard down before he gets very far, there’s something I need to talk to him about.” 

Foggy goes still. He searches her face. “What did he say?” 

“Seems like Grotto’s been lying to us about a few things,” says Darcy. She rolls to her feet. “That’s all. We need to go. You go right, I go left.” 

“You sure you’re up for it?” 

“I’m fine, Foggy.” She doesn’t try to make it sound like anything other than a lie. There’s no point. “Go, Foggy, he’s getting away.” 

He wavers. Then Foggy nods, unlocks the break room door, and leaves without a word. She’s on the threshold when she realizes that under the bandages, her knuckles are bleeding again. She’s clenched her fist so tight that the scabs have cracked, and it’s sinking sharply red into the gauze.  
_Grotto_. Find Grotto. _Lafayette Street_. Find Grotto, get him out of the way somehow, and then go after Castle, go after Matt. Go after all of them. Find Grotto first. 

And when she finds Grotto, what? 

It bursts into her head, the image, driving the baton into him, cracking his skull, knocking him down into the dirt, breaking him, bit by bit, because _you killed them, you killed an innocent man and a woman and children, a family, you killed them and I tried to protect you, you killed them._ “Nothing down this way,” Kate says into her ear, “I’m going to check the next floor,” and lava rushes up into her mouth. _What are you going to do when you find him, Darcy_? 

No. God. No. _No_. She staggers back, yanks the door shut and locks it. Presses her palms to the cool wood, tries not to heave. God, _no_. 

She stands over the sink for a good minute, but she doesn’t throw up. Somehow, that’s the worst part of it all. 

.

.

.

She answers. 

“Well, you certainly took your time.” 

“It took a little while for me to get back to the apartment. This city is busier than I remember. There never used to be so many people using the rooftops instead of the sidewalks.” 

“Did anyone see you?” 

“I’m not completely inept.” Pause. “I was under the impression, from what you said, that she was relatively untrained. Judging by what I saw tonight, she’s either been learning fast, or she has a flair for this. Or both, which is aggravating.” 

“Did she see your face?” 

“You keep asking me questions like you think I’m a complete novice at this. Ruins a girl’s self-confidence.” 

“That isn’t an answer.” 

“She never came close to touching my mask. Then again, I don’t think that was her intention. She didn’t seem to care who I was. To be completely honest, I’m a little irritated with how the whole thing went. She spent the whole fight distracted with what was happening on a completely different rooftop. Which, to be fair, I don’t blame her. It was fairly distracting. Bullets everywhere and a botched ambush, it’s no wonder she kept trying to pay attention to other things.” 

“You confronted her alone? Lilith.” 

“The archer interfered towards the end. Not to mention that the police opened fire. Seriously, I thought this was New York, not the Wild West.” 

“Things have changed in the city since the last time you were here.” 

“Really. I didn’t notice.” She shifts the glass of wine on the countertop. “What have I walked into here? I’m not particularly inclined to go after this woman again until I know more details.” 

“Figure them out yourself. You’re not a fool. Besides, you have a vested interest in uncovering how this woman works, don’t you?” 

“You don’t have to be patronizing.” 

“Use your ingenuity. When you report again, I want a little more than she was distracted.” Another pause. “What of the other matter, what did you learn about him?” 

“Not much. I didn’t get close enough, today.” 

“Don’t be nervy.” 

“Easy for you to say.” 

“You’re capable of more than this, and you know it.” A sigh, gusting with static. “Do better.” 

The call ends. 

.

.

.

_Don’t get up, Matty_. 

Chains. Chains and the city and rust on his tongue. Bullets and copper and the sharpness of explosives. A heartbeat. Blood and dog and metal and gunpowder, leather and cracked ribs and popping, heavy bones. Chains and the city. 

“Morning, sunshine,” says the Punisher. “Sleep well?” 

There’s a mosquito whine ringing in his ears. A helicopter passes overhead. Too far away for him to hear voices. He can’t tell which company it’s from. The comm bud in his ear is stinging, crackling like it’s been damaged, but he can still make out sounds. Breathing, a little. Kate cursing under her breath. Nothing from Darcy. _Where are you_? And then, even faster: _don’t come near here, don’t_. He heaves a breath, and jerks against the chains. 

“Told your girl I’d call her when you woke up,” says the man. He collects a gun. “Sure took your time. She’s probably worried sick by now.” 

Fragments in his head. Glass. A water tower. Gunshots. Falling, deafness, the world shut off, everything gone, only flares of movement and those are barely manageable, hardly perceptible, only a flicker of smoke in the dark, and he’d never known how much he’d relied on his hearing until it was gone, never even thought about it, _vibrations and variations and shifting air, what part of it is hearing and what part of it is touch and sensation and currents, what’s me and what’s the universe_ , and there’s a split in his tongue where his teeth dug in and _promise me_ — 

“Where is she?” he says. 

The man with the gun crouches down, and goes through a box. Matt yanks at the chains. Too tight for him to shift; loose enough to keep him from popping a rib. He pulls again. He can barely think beyond the pounding in his skull. “ _Where is she_?” 

“Don’t know,” says the man with the gun. “Don’t care much. I’ll call her up in a minute. Wanted to talk to you a little, first.” 

“Shit,” says Kate, but it’s under her breath. “Bastard’s gone.” There’s crusted blood on his teeth. Splits in his cheek, in his lip. His head is still ringing. Tinnitus in his ears. _Sit down_ , she’d said. _If not for you, then for me_. He can’t, and he couldn’t, but his head is pounding. Nausea creeps all through him, not just in his guts but through his skin, through to the tips of his fingers, pooling in a sick, yellowy feeling like rotting egg. 

“You wanna talk to me?” Matt says. “Looks like I’m all ears.” 

That takes him by surprise, Matt thinks. There’s a hitch in the man’s breathing, in his heartbeat. He turns away, and opens up one of his boxes with a crowbar, picking through the sawdust. Matt says, “Where’d you find those, anyway? Hit up a military storehouse?” 

The man pulls a gun from the box, and sights down it, off the edge of the roof. "You ever think about how you’re gonna die?” 

Matt twists at the chains again. There’s no point to it and he knows it—they’re woven too tight, like the guy’s practiced at this, the Punisher or whatever it is he calls himself, like he’s done this to someone before and knows precisely how to layer them to make it impossible to move—but it gives him something to do. There’s fury leaping beneath his skin, and it gives him an outlet. “Not as often as I should,” he says, and lets his hands drop. “Probably.” 

“Probably.” The man with the gun turns, and settles with his back to the wall. The thermos smells like cheap coffee, brewed strong and thick. How many times has he does this by now? This man with the guns. How many times has he settled, and waited for a target? “Never had it look you in the face while you dance around rooftops, play this little game with yourself? When I shot you, the other night. You see death looking back?” 

“No,” Matt says. “Not last night, no.” 

“Could’ve killed you,” says the man. 

“Didn’t.” His throat’s scratching. “You could have killed me, and you didn’t. You don’t have to kill anyone else. You could stop now. Walk away.” 

“Walk away.” The man folds both hands around the lid of his thermos. “Could you walk away, Red? That something you think you could do?” 

“Yes,” Matt says. It tastes sour. “I could.” 

“Bullshit.” The man snorts. “Bullshit, Red. You can’t walk away. You couldn’t stop if you tried. You get off on this shit. Running around in your Halloween costume, telling yourself you’re making a difference. Pair of you don’t do fuck-all.” He swirls the coffee in the lid. “Don’t think she could walk away, either. Different reasons, same result.” 

Matt bites the inside of his cheek before he can let out a hiss. “Don’t talk about her.” 

“You wanna hit me?” The man bares his teeth. “Wanna hurt me? Can’t do anything unless I let you outta that, Red. You know that as well as me. Only way you’re getting up is if I let you.” 

Matt knocks his head against the brick, and immediately regrets it. The world goes blurry for a second. Somewhere nearby, a bell tolls. Ringing, over and over. He counts them. “Midnight? What cathedral is that, St. Patrick’s?” 

"St. Matthew’s,” says the man, and Matt can’t help it. Something catches against the roof of his mouth that could be a laugh. _Figures_. 

“St. Matthew’s? You Catholic?” 

“Long time ago.” He sips his coffee. “Should call your girl. She’ll be wondering where you are.” 

_Call her_? He swallows, and realizes: the receiver isn’t pressed against his throat. Darcy’s turned her speaker off. He can still hear soft hospital sounds, Karen and Kate whispering to each other about a locked door— _Darcy, sweetheart, no_ —but he can’t hear anything from Darcy herself. And neither of them, he realizes, neither Darcy nor Kate can hear him, now. _So much for getting this bastard to drop a location_. “I said not to talk about her.” 

“Big words, looking at you right now, Red.” He draws a tin from his pocket, and taps his thumbnail against the lid. “Touchy about her, aren’t you? Care about her? Seems like a bad thing to do, business you’ve put yourself in. Not a very long life expectancy, even if you pussyfoot around it like a pair of kids. You go out every night, the pair of you—you know her, outside of those long johns? You must. Both of you, playing hero—where’d you find her, huh? How’d you drag her into it?” 

“We’re not talking about this.” 

“Doesn’t strike me as the type to get dragged anywhere, Cat.” There’s a tightness to his voice now that there wasn’t before. “Came into it herself, didn’t she? Not from here, either, not with her drawl. Virginia, Georgia? South Carolina? You go down and find her or did she come up and find you?” 

“Stop it.” 

“She found you,” says the man. Matt pulls at the chains again. “Came up here and found you somehow, didn’t she? ‘s sweet. Like a fairy story. Devil and the Witch Queen.” 

Matt shuts his eyes. “Don’t talk about what you don’t understand.”

“Don’t I?” He knocks his thermos to the lid, and pours more coffee. “How far would you go for her, Red? Pretty sure I know how far she’d go for you. How far would you go? Die for her, kill for her? Let the whole city burn for her? Tell me, she always—” He flickers his hand in front of his face. “She always in those rose-colored glasses? Haven’t seen a pair of those in years. Doesn’t fight like a damn hippy, that’s for sure.”

“ _Shut up_.” 

“Hippies, they don’t come at you like they want you dead. But your girl, that Cat, she—she didn’t hesitate. Not for a second. Not after she saw you fall.” The man tips his head. “Drives you crazy, doesn’t it? You’ve never outright killed doing this, the pair of you, but when she thought you were dead, didn’t think twice about killing me. That why you came after me alone? Or are you actually that stupid?” 

_Both_ , he thinks. He bares his teeth. “How’re your ribs? They hurt?” 

That, he just ignores. “You know what I think? I think it scares the unholy shit out of you. Pair of you, out together, doing whatever the hell it is that you do. You run out with someone every night like that, fight with them, you know when something’s off. Know when they’re on the edge and can’t come back down. You knew she wanted to kill me the second you woke up, didn’t you? Did she mention it? Came at me with my own goddamn knife and tried to gut me like a fish. And that scares the shit out of you, doesn’t it? Makes you wonder. How far would you have to push to get her to do it? Not that far, I’m thinking.” 

“You come near her, I swear to God—” 

“—you’ll kill me?” The man looks at him. “You want to. I can see it in your face. You want to, and you don’t. You see the shit that overflows in this goddamn city, and you stay your hand. But what’d you do for her, Red? If it’d been her I’d cracked off on, last night, her and not you, what would you’ve done? If you’d thought she was dead. If I killed her, what would you have done? Throw me in jail? Tell me not to do it again? Smack my wrist and scold me the way you do with every bit of scum you let walk? Or would you have slit me open the way she tried to?” 

His heart’s beating too loud in his ears. Kate’s talking again. So is Darcy. He can’t differentiate them over the cacophony. “You don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.” 

“No, you don’t have any fucking idea,” says the man with the gun, and then he’s surged forward, and there’s that same gun pressed to his helmet, right to the welded place, jamming his head back into the wall. “You know what I think? I think you’re a hypocrite. I think you’re a coward. I think that you, and me, and her, I think we’re the same thing, the same goddamn thing, and I think the difference between me and you is that I’m the one willing to make the hard call and put these bastards down for good!” 

“These people you murder, these men you shoot down—they have families, they have people who love them, you’re robbing them of whatever chance they have to redeem themselves, that’s not your call—” 

“Ah, for fuck’s sake,” says the man with the gun, and flicks the safety back on. “You wanna know what else I think?” 

"Not really." 

“I think you’re one day, one second, a single life away from being me.” He stares. “And I think you know it.” 

There’s a heartbeat. Old cigarettes. Swearing. 

“Someone’s coming,” Matt says. 

The man waggles the gun. “Better go and say hello.” 

.

.

.

_Get up, Darcy_. 

She sits, and stares at the mug. It’s a struggle in control, she thinks. The longer she keeps herself from throwing the thing against the wall, the more human she can pretend to be. 

_Get up, Darcy, come on._

Her whole body’s jumping, but she can’t move. 

_You have to find Matt. You have to keep them all safe. You have to save him, Darcy, come on, get up_. 

But there’s nothing left. If she leaves this room, she can’t trust herself to keep her hands clean. She can’t trust herself, not right now, not when her hand’s in her bag and she’s clenching the handle of Castle’s knife so tight that her bones are going to pop through her skin. She can only wait, and when she waits she thinks, and when she thinks she’s paralyzed. 

_Stop thinking_. 

There’s nothing else she can do. The thoughts she’s been pushing back for the past two days have all crashed together, and she can’t peel herself free of the wreckage. She’s sitting here and barely breathing, trying to wrangle herself back together, trying to get back under control, but she can’t. There’s nowhere to go anymore, no one to protect. _Grotto_ , but they’d misjudged Grotto. They’d let Grotto manipulate them. Somehow she and Matt and Foggy and Karen had looked at Grotto and never seen the truth about him when everyone around them had seemed to see it so clearly, that this was a man who would kill children to save his own goddamn skin, and if she leaves this room she might kill him, she really, really might, and she can’t get up. If she moves, she might break, and the breaking might shatter her, but it’ll also probably wind up with someone dead, and she can’t live with that, she _can’t_ — 

_But does someone like Grotto really deserve to live?_

She’s never the one to fall apart. She puts them back together. Or she tries, at least. She’s surrounded by so many shattered people, and she’s not very good at fitting them back into a semblance of a whole, but damn it, she tries. They all try. They keep each other from cracking. But right now, she’s in pieces, and she’s not certain that it can be fixed this time. She’s broken to shards and she needs to move, she needs to get up and stop thinking and deal with the problem, but she can’t remember how to do it. 

_When did I get so arrogant that I didn’t even notice a snake in my shoe?_

She’s not the only one. They’ve all been arrogant. Not just her and Matt, but Foggy too, Foggy and Karen and Kate. Riding high on taking down Fisk, the one man who could never be beaten, or so they’d thought, a man who’d owned the whole city and blocked them at every turn. They’d taken on Wilson Fisk and they’d won, and they’d let it go to their heads, all of them, let themselves think that maybe they could make a difference. Maybe they can fix things one at a time. And yeah, they’ve fixed some things, there are people who are alive today that wouldn’t be if they hadn’t stepped in—Mrs. Almeida, Elena Cardenas, Christ, even Ben, probably—but God, what if it isn’t enough? What if doing what they’re doing is only making things worse? 

_When did I get so overconfident that I thought I could fix the whole world just by throwing a few assholes out windows?_

What if this warping of Daredevil and Lilith, what if this twisted part of them that’s coming forward in the Punisher—what if that’s right, instead? But that can’t be right. Because there are evil people in the world, yes, people like Fisk, but that can’t be all there is. There are evil people and frightened people and cruel people, kind people and smart people and innocent people, truly innocent people, and are they really outweighed by the cruelty she sees every night? 

People get hurt, if they don’t do this. If she doesn’t put on the suit, if Matt doesn’t, then people get hurt who don’t have to be. But it’s top-down, bottom-up mechanics. _We’re fighting the symptoms, not the source_. They’d known that with Fisk. _Cut off the head, the snake dies._ But how do you fight a whole society? How do you cut off the head of the planet? This can’t be how human beings are, this can’t be how the world works, it _shouldn’t_ be how the world works, and she’d thought she was doing something to fix it but maybe she’s only ever made things worse. Maybe Castle isn’t completely wrong, after all. 

_Think it’s something in you_. 

She can’t move. 

She expects Karen to be the first one to come by, but no. It’s Kate. She raps a few times on the door, and calls through the wood, but when Darcy says nothing, she walks away again. Then it’s Karen, quietly, confused—“Darcy, are you still in here? I just want to talk to you.”—but when Darcy ignores that, too, there’s a scuffing sound against the door. She thinks Karen might be leaning against it from the outside, not speaking, just standing. Then Foggy—“Darcy, come on, we have to figure out what to do, just let us in, will you?”—but she’s trapped in mist. _Still want me dead, Cat?_ and her hands are still, not shaking; her eyes are dry; her stomach is churning but it’s not from nausea; it’s reality, and it’s cold and heavy and weighs her limbs down. Then Kate comes back. “No luck with Grotto,” she says, muffled. It comes through loud and clear in Darcy’s comm. _Shut up, Kate, if he talks I might not hear it_. “He managed to sneak past the security guard in the parking garage, he’s gone.” 

“Son of a bitch.” That one’s Foggy. He, at least, can echo right through the door. He whacks it twice, hard enough to rattle. “Come out of there, please. We can deal with it, okay? Just—I know you can hear me, so unlock the door.” 

“How long has she been in there?”

“I’m not sure she ever left. I went to look for Grotto and when I came back the door was still locked.” 

“Maybe we should get security,” says Karen. 

“No security,” Kate snaps. “Not right now. Let her be for a minute.” 

She pushes the cup closer to the edge, and watches it. _Go home_ , she thinks. _Go home and be safe, Grotto’s gone, there’s nothing to do._

_Still want to kill me, Cat?_

_Yes._

“Figures it’d be you people,” says a voice, muffled through the comm. “Get out of the way, I have a key. All of you, go hover somewhere else. Bug Louisa, she’s pissing me off tonight.” 

“Give her a minute, all of you, Jesus—” 

“She can’t stay in there.” 

“Claire—” 

“Go away, thug life,” says Claire fondly. There’s another buzz of voices, and then Claire’s stepped inside and shut the door. Darcy stares at her, a faint buzzing in her ears. The comm is still terribly silent. 

They stare at each other for a minute. 

“Last time I talked to you in here, the city was on fire.” Claire leans against the break room door. “Really hoping that isn’t gonna repeat itself.” 

“I don’t want to talk,” Darcy says. It’s the same cold, quiet voice she’d used with Foggy, but there’s something else threading through it, a reediness she can’t quite define. If she’d heard it on someone else, she would call it _panic_. “Don’t ask me to, please.” 

Claire’s eyes narrow down to slits. She folds her arms over her chest. “I’ve had enough shit from every bozo who’s come in here tonight with brandy stains and bullet holes, Darcy, I don’t need any more of it from you.” 

Darcy goes back to watching the World’s No. 1 Aunt mug. 

“You’re scaring the crap out of them, you know.” Claire rocks forward, her arms still folded, and frowns. “Generally you seem to be the one keeping them from winding up like this, so I’m a little puzzled about why you’re hiding in here like a hibernating grizzly bear.” 

“I’m not hibernating.” Darcy touches the very tips of her fingers to the handle of the mug, and then draws away. “I’m thinking.” 

“Seems to be some pretty deep thinking, to scare the people who love you that badly.” 

_I’m scared_ , Darcy nearly says. _I’m scared that all we’ve been doing is for nothing, Claire. I’m scared of the world. I’m scared of myself._ But she keeps her mouth shut. 

Claire drags the other chair around to Darcy’s side of the table, and straddles it. “You know, last time this happened you were nearly in hysterics. I’m liking the hysterics more than this blank-faced PTSD thing you have going on right now.” 

“I don’t have PTSD,” Darcy says, and pushes at the mug again. 

“Right.” 

( _Bang_.) 

( _I am going to kill you_.) 

( _Tell me what you have found out about the Black Sky_.) 

( _The fewer lies you tell, the less he’ll hit you_.) 

( _They found Eli_.) 

“I thought you were getting run off your feet downstairs.” She shoves the mug so close to the edge it starts to tip, and then hooks her finger through the handle and draws it back onto solid ground again. “What are you doing in here?” 

“Dealing with your dumb ass, apparently.” Claire shrugs. “When people tell security there’s a crazy woman who’s taken the break room hostage like a hoarding dragon and won’t talk to anybody, I kind of get sent to deal with the problem. That’s the issue with being competent. People dump all their shit on you and expect you to deal with it.” She considers. “Plus, they know I know you, and figured I might have better luck getting in through the door than Tom the security guard from Antigua.” 

Darcy doesn’t say anything. She presses the comm closer into her ear. It’s gone back to the soft clinking of being trapped somewhere, cut off from sound. Sometimes, she thinks, she catches a burble that could be a voice. She’s not sure, though. Claire sighs. 

“You’re scaring the shit out of me, too,” she says. “You’re not acting like you.” 

_Good_. It scares her, how vehement the thought is. _Maybe now you’ll get it_. But that’s hateful, that’s awful, and something, some curl under the rage, revolts from the idea. “Maybe I am,” Darcy says, after a moment. “Maybe this is what I’m really like.” 

“Now, that sounds way too much like Mr. Hair Shirt, and it’s probably coming from the fact that I never see one of you without the other these days which, let’s be real, has probably oversaturated you to the point of actual insanity.” Claire frowns again. “Not to mention the fact that I’m pretty sure you’re running on like two days without sleep, and you’re also scared out of your mind.” 

She prods at the mug again. 

“Kate said that this guy who has Matt, he said something to you. About you. That why you’re sitting in here in the dark?” 

Her lips are dry. Darcy wets them down. “Nothing he said to me wasn’t true, Claire.” 

“Yeah, from his point of view, maybe. And when you’re scared for as long as you’ve been scared, when you haven’t slept and you’re living on adrenalin and too much coffee and an actual year of bad decisions and bruises, I’m pretty sure it sounds like it’s true from your point of view, too. But that doesn’t mean it’s true from ours.” 

There’s something gnawing away at her teeth, itching. Darcy presses her lips together, and keeps it trapped inside. 

“You’re scared out of your mind,” Claire says. “You’re scared and you’re angry and that’s allowed, Darcy. We’re all angry. We’re all scared, right now. We’re scared Matt might never come back. We’re scared we’re gonna lose both of you in one night, the way you’re acting. We’re scared of this guy that you’ve been after. We’re scared of what’s happening in the city. But you’re making it worse for everyone by hiding in here.” 

“I’ll scare them worse if I come out.” 

“Scare them?” Her eyes narrow. “Scare them how? Scare them by not being on top of your shit? Scare them by breaking down in a stairwell because someone you love is being held hostage by some trigger-happy dipshit, and you’re stuck here waiting? Scare them by letting that same jackhole get into your head because you’re exhausted and angry and maybe he said some things that rung true and you didn’t expect them to? I don’t need to hear them,” Claire adds, holding up her hands. “I really don’t want to know what a guy who’s spent the past month or so adding bodies to the morgue has to say that makes you think he’s right. I don’t need to know to see how much it’s freaking you out. It’s just frightening them, and that gang of sidekicks you have out there waiting? They’re some of the bravest people I’ve ever met in my life. So it’s really, seriously unnerving, let me tell you.” 

“They’re not sidekicks.” 

“Partners, then,” Claire says. “Your gang of homies. The Scooby Gang. The Batfamily. Team Purgatory, or whatever it is you people call yourselves.” 

_We hold each other back_ , she thinks. But Matt’s not here to help, and she’s not there to watch his back, and she’s spiraling. “I’m scaring me,” she says. Something pops and bleeds inside her. “I’m—I don’t like me very much right now.” 

Claire looks at her bandaged hand. “And I’m guessing you don’t want to talk about any of it.” 

She presses her hand to her mouth, just for a moment. “If I did,” she says, “I don’t—I don’t know.” 

And that really sounds like Matt. But she can’t voice this, not to Claire. She could, maybe, to Matt, or to Karen, Karen who’d aimed a gun and pulled the trigger and lives with that every day, but not Claire. Claire, who fixes people, and doesn’t break them; Claire, who drew her lines and walked away; Claire, who keeps her head high and helps them in spite of everything; Claire, who is so genuinely good that sometimes Darcy wonders how a human being like Claire Temple came to exist on the planet she did; she can’t tell Claire she wants to kill someone. She can’t tell Claire she’s starting to wonder if the Punisher isn’t right. She can’t tell Claire about any of it, not really. Claire sighs again, and rocks away. 

“Christ.” She presses her hands to her face, and then swipes her hair up and out of her eyes, hooking her fingers to the back of her neck like her shoulders are sore. “Well, I’m gonna sit in here for like…five minutes, because I’ve had ten severed digits in the past hour and need to just…not move for as long as I can get away with it. So when you leave, pretend I said something inspiring, and made you less of a bridge troll.” 

She can’t help it. She blinks. “That’s it?” 

“I can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped.” Claire shrugs. “Something you learn when you work in a hospital. You know there’s this guy I fix up every night, like clockwork? Crackhead. He comes wandering in with some kind of infection, some new cut that’s gone septic or some knocked-out tooth. The same cop always brings him in, and always takes him away again. I think it’s a way to get him off the street for a few hours, make sure he gets clean. But he’s always a crackhead, this guy. Never does a thing to clean his cuts, never stops tripping over curbs or stealing wallets on the way out, trying to find a new way to get high. We stopped giving him pamphlets ages ago, stopped trying to get him to go to rehab. He never listens. He doesn’t want the help. But you—you’re not like that. Which is why I’m confused about what you’re doing right now, because you never let the bullshit that jackasses like this come up with ever get to you, not like this. So why is it bothering you this time?” 

“Because the shit other jackasses say hasn’t ever been true,” Darcy says. “Maybe this one is right.” 

“So what?” 

Darcy opens her mouth, and shuts it again. “What?” 

“So what if it’s true?” Claire braces against the back of the shitty chair. “So what if whatever he said about you is true? Doesn’t make what he’s doing any less wrong. Doesn’t make what he’s doing to you right now any less sick.” 

That just…won’t process. It feels like Claire’s detonated a grenade in her brain. “But—” 

“Since when have you ever cared what people think about you, Lewis? Since when have you ever done a damn thing anybody says? Since when have you ever not taken one look at a problem and gone at it with every little scrap that you have in you? You did it with Fisk. What makes this guy different?” 

_Still want me dead, Cat_? 

( _Bang_.) 

“What if it isn’t working?” Darcy says. “What we do. What if—what if there’s something more we should be doing? What if this guy, the—whatever they’re calling him. What if he can see something about people, about the world, that we don’t?” 

Claire’s eyebrows snap together. “Seems to me that a guy who goes around shooting people in the head and cutting off their hands might not be the best source of philosophical advice.” 

“Karen thinks we helped create him,” Darcy says. “Me and Matt. She thinks that what we do might have started this. And—and from what this guy says, I’m not so sure she’s wrong.” 

“Yeah, well, people start beating the shit out of each other in alleyways, it gets inspiring. But you know, people have been coming up with this idea for hundreds of years. Look at the Avengers. You saying that the Black Widow shooting aliens in the face and all that shit that happened in Sokovia is what drove you to do the Chinatown thing?” 

That nickname just won’t die. “But he’s doing it here, Claire, not—not halfway across the world, here. He’s killing people _here_.” 

“That doesn’t mean all the bodies he’s dropped are laid at your feet.” 

“People are dying.” 

“And you’re not the one killing them.” 

“We’re not _stopping_ anything.” She digs her nails into her knees. “We—we go out and we do this and yeah, maybe—maybe sometimes it helps, but nothing ends. People still go and—and hurt each other, Claire, they destroy each other, society’s stacked against us, we’re not stopping—we’re not really stopping anything at all anymore, not really.” 

“Tell that to the woman I saw in here the other night, whose boyfriend tried to rape her.” Claire folds her hands tight around the back of the chair. “Tell that to the little boy whose life the pair of you saved when he nearly walked right into a gang drive-by two months ago. Tell that to Elena Cardenas. Tell that to Karen.” She stares. “Tell that to me.” 

Darcy can’t breathe. She swallows her heart back down. “You don’t get it.”

“No, I don’t,” Claire says. “I mean, I understand that you must be going through some major shit right now, but, you know, I’ve never had my boyfriend shot right in front of me. I’ve never had to deal with half the shit you take on every night. I’ve never let a murderer into my head. So yeah, I don’t get that, and I don’t have any idea how to even begin to comprehend the crap going on in your brain right now. But there’s something else that I really don’t get, and that’s why you’re sitting here locked in my goddamn break room when you could be doing something about it.” 

“I can’t leave.” 

“Why not?” 

“I can’t, Claire. If I go—if I go out there, I might—there’s nothing I can trust myself to _do_.” 

Claire shakes her head. “That’s bullshit. Loads of things you could do.” 

“Like what?” 

“Go looking for Grotto.” 

Darcy looks away. “Not a good idea right now.” 

“He’s your client, isn’t he? Kate said something about you sticking around here to keep an eye on him, but he’s gone. Go track that little weasel down. Get him back before this bastard with the guns and the fire and every other damn thing he’s pulled finds him first.” 

_Lafayette Street_ , Castle had said. “He won’t listen.” 

“So make him listen.” Claire scoffs. “What the hell are you doing, Lewis? Hiding in here isn’t going to do a damn thing to help anyone. All you’re doing is making it worse. Stick that iron back in your spine. You want to fix something? Go out and _fix it_. Look for Grotto, look for Matt, try to find something else out about the Big Bad. Do whatever you think is necessary. Just do something other than sitting here alone in the dark. Christ, you’d think it was Matt Murdock in here, not Darcy Lewis.” 

“I don’t know what I’ll do to him!” Darcy snaps. “Claire, if—I don’t know what I’ll do, if I catch up to him. I don’t know what I might do.” 

Claire goes quiet, watching her. Outside, someone drops a bedpan, and swears. Something tickles in her throat. Darcy blinks, her eyes hot, and stares at her knees. 

“Matt said once that part of why he does this is because he enjoys it.” Clare rubs at her eyes, and lifts her gaze to the ceiling. “That he likes punishing people. Maybe both of you do. But the thing is, there's something you told me, too. That if you were doing this alone, then yeah. You might do something terrible. But you're not doing this alone, and you _know that_. if you were really a bad person, Darcy, you wouldn’t be sitting in here kicking yourself for something you haven’t even done yet. You haven’t done _anything_ to Grotto.” 

_But I want to_. “Claire,” Darcy says. “Claire, I’m so _angry_.” 

“Don’t blame you.” 

“No, you don’t—you don’t get it.” She dries her hands on her pants. “Have you ever been so angry it’s like you’re nothing but skin? Like it’s eaten away every other part of you, and you can’t remember how it was to have lungs? Have you ever been so—” Darcy stops, and swallows. “I don’t trust myself right now, Claire. I can’t—I can’t trust myself. Not right now.” 

“Then trust us,” Claire says. She doesn’t hesitate. “Trust that we think you can do something good. Trust that we trust you to be who you are, even with your anger, even with all your bullshit, Darcy, because you’re kind, and you’re passionate, and you fight too much and you have the smartest goddamn mouth I’ve ever heard on a human being, and you are good. You’re glue. You know how fast this shit would fall apart without you? All of us, we need you, the way you are, as fucked up as you can be and as bitter and awful and bitchy and weird. Because you, at your core—you are a good damn human, and we need you. Trust us to know that, even if you can’t believe it. Trust us.” 

It should connect, she thinks. It’s all an echo. _Don’t ask me to let you hurt yourself, Darcy_ , Karen had said, and Foggy, _you know he’s wrong_. When Claire reaches out with both hands and takes Darcy’s, Darcy doesn’t yank back. 

“Yeah,” she says. “Maybe the world is fucked up. But we don’t stop trying to fix something just because it keeps breaking. It’s not who I am, and it’s not who you are. I’ll be damned if I give up on any of you assholes yet.” 

“You keep saying so many nice things and I’ll start to think you have a crush on me, Temple,” says Darcy, but her voice is wet and sticky and she thinks she might be crying again, which, fuck that. No. Claire snorts, and pinches Darcy’s wrist with two fingers. 

“Trust us,” she says again. “Trust that we want you to come out of this stupid break room and throw yourself right back into the fight, because you’re good at it, you never stop fighting, even when you’re scared. But for God’s sake, stop acting like the Wizard Howl. It has your little gaggle in a tizzy, and it’s driving all the nurses on this floor up the fucking wall.” 

Darcy chokes. “I’m not being completely like Howell Jenkins, am I?” 

“Minus the slime and the hair dye, but who knows, I’ve heard stories about you in college. Wouldn’t surprise me.” Claire squeezes her fingers, and then gets up, slipping away. Darcy watches her go, the blue scrubs and the dark hair and all the exhaustion, all the people she takes on and never, ever lets fall back to earth. Her eyes burn. Darcy glances back at the mug, and stands, and pushes the chair away with her foot. She peels the sub-vocal comm off of her throat, and clicks it once, turning it off. She doesn’t want Kate to hear this part. She doesn’t want _anyone_ to hear this part. 

“Claire?” 

Claire turns at the door, her mouth going crooked. “What is it? Feels like I tell you this every week, but I’m not much of a hugger.” 

“No, that’s not—no.” If someone tries to swallow her up in a hug right now, she’s going to explode. “I just—I need you to do me a favor. And you can’t—you can’t tell any of them about it. Not Matt—” her voice breaks “—not Karen or Foggy or any of them. You can’t tell them, okay?” 

Her forehead puckers. “If it’s something illegal—” 

“It’s not. It’s just a favor.” She draws a deep breath in through her nose. “I just need you to find some names for me.” 

.

.

.

He comes to again with blood lingering on his teeth and Frank Castle—Castle, Darcy had said; his name is Castle—watching him. 

Matt swallows. Copper cascades down the back of his throat. “Didn’t have to hit me.” 

“You were yelling too loud.” Frank watches him, carefully. “All that bullshit about truth and redemption and Santa Claus. Would’ve woken up somebody downstairs.” He frowns. “Only out for about half an hour, maybe.” 

He turns his head, and spits. 

“You can hear her,” Frank says, abruptly. “Can’t you?” 

Matt keeps his chin lifted, like he’s staring at the sky. He could never really see the stars in the city, even before the accident. The clouds and the smog and the backwash from the city lights always blocked them out. 

“You nearly killed that man, Frank,” he says. “You nearly killed him for nothing.” 

“That was a show, Red, just to make sure you were listening.” He shrugs, like he’s tossing off a fly. “You can hear her right now, can’t you? Lilith. In that helmet of yours.” 

She’s turned her vocal receiver back on, so, yes. But he’s not about to say that. “What do you care?” 

“Lilith and the Devil. Devil of Hell’s Kitchen.” Frank’s mouth curls. “Daredevil.”

“I didn’t ask for them to start calling me that.” 

“Yeah, well, she named herself,” says Frank shortly. “Neither of you seem to be running away from the big names. Running from everything else, but not from those.” 

“What are we running from, then?” 

“Put on that mask, walk out at night, you know, maybe when you get home you can take it off again and think, _that wasn’t me, that did those things. That wasn’t me_.” Frank turns a bullet between his fingers. “Soldiers don’t get to do that, Red. Don’t get to do things like that. Don’t get that privilege. And from the looks of things, Cat knows that better than you.” 

“Soldiers, huh?” If he can keep him on this, keep him talking, then maybe— “You know what I think?” 

“Christ. Bet you’re gonna tell me.” 

“You’re still at war.” 

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” says Frank, and draws a thing of duct tape from his box. He tears off a strip. “Getting real sick of your psycho shrink shit, Red. At least your girl can’t talk back.” 

“Who’d you lose?” He yanks at the chains again. No give. “You’re not the only one who’s lost someone. You don’t have to keep doing this. It doesn’t fix anything. It doesn’t fix a damn thing, all it does is make things worse—” 

“Do you eat self-righteousness for breakfast, Red? Swim in it? Jesus.” 

“Everyone has lost someone,” Matt says. “ _Everyone_ has lost someone. Doesn’t mean you have to kill. Doesn’t mean you get to take away the one chance these people have to make something better of themselves, Frank. It doesn’t make you God.” 

“Don’t think I’m God,” says Frank. “I think I’m just doing something no one else has the guts to manage.” 

“Bullshit. They deserve a chance. Everyone deserves a chance.” 

He scoffs again. “Like you believe that.” 

“There’s goodness in you,” Matt says. “There has to be. There’s goodness in every human being, and every time you take another life, you snuff it out.” 

There’s a shattering on the other side of the comms. Glass. Darcy shouting. Matt lunges away from the brick, and snaps back like a rubber band. Frank blinks at him, slowly, evaluating. He says, “She’s doing something, isn’t she?”

“ _What the hell did you say to her_?” 

“The truth.” Frank tips his head. “She scaring you yet?” 

On the other end of the comms, he hears a man scream. 

“Loss doesn’t work the same for everybody in the world, Red,” says Frank, and he settles the tape over Matt’s mouth. When he lashes out with one foot, tries to take out a knee, Frank steps smoothly out of the way. “Loss isn’t the same. Ways we deal with it aren’t the same. Everybody’s different. You think you’re a hero, but you’re nothing but a half-measure, and I think some part of you already knows that.” 

Matt can’t speak. The tape is like venom on his skin, stinging. He breathes through his nose, and tries to think. On the comms, Darcy’s still screaming. “ _Is it true_ ,” she says, “ _did you kill them, is it true_ ,” and he’s never heard her like this, raw and shattering and something beyond anything he’s ever known her to be. Something that echoes inside his ribs. Something familiar. His skin is burning and he can’t tell if it’s from fear or the adrenalin or from being trapped or from the echo of it in his ribs, her voice, because he’s never heard her like this before but he can imagine what it took to get her here, can guess at what Frank must have said—

He slams both feet into the roof of the building, and shouts into the tape until he has to take a breath. 

“Ever hear a cat scream?” Frank racks a gun, and sets it aside. He’s singularly unconcerned by all the writhing. “Like when it gets caught in a burning building? Shit’s creepy, Red. Scares the hell out of you. Like foxes screaming, you know. It’s not a human sound, but it’s just close enough that you think, _maybe there’s a person trapped in there_. Makes every hair on your body stand up.” 

He pulls at the chain again. 

“Never thought humans could make noises like that.” Frank shifts the rifle, sights down it. “Noise like that, you only make it when you’ve lost everything. When you’re so goddamn scared and hurt and angry that the only thing you can actually do is scream.” He glances at Matt over his shoulder. “When I shot you,” Frank says. “You hear your girl screaming? Not a sound you forget, if you do. Did you hear her scream like that?” 

Jesus. _Jesus_. Matt snarls something into the tape, and he thinks it might be _fuck you_. On the comms, he catches a burst of Kate. (“Lilith—”) 

“She’s out there somewhere looking for you, right now.” He straps a grenade to his chest. “Know how lucky you are, having that? Know how goddamn blessed?” 

_Yes_. 

(A scream, and shattering glass, and God, Darcy—) 

“You don’t.” He scoffs. “No way you can. Fucking choir boy half-cocked half-chicken bullshit. You want to know how lucky you are, Red? You watch it get taken from you. That’s the only way you know.”

Deep, burning, sudden, inexorable cold. Cold all the way through his marrow, down into his bones and deeper. Cold and scorching frost. “Don’t,” he says, into the tape, impossible, unintelligible. “Don’t you fucking _touch her_ —”

“Pissed you off now, haven’t I, Red?” Frank says, and comes closer. “Who’s gonna stop me? You gonna stop me? Try and stop me, Red. Only way you’re gonna stop me doing what I’m doing is if you kill me, if you come at me like you want me dead. Only way it’s gonna work, Red.”

He tries to say it, _I’m not gonna kill you, Frank_ , but it won’t come out, because there’s a memory pressing up against his tongue, because _not her, not ever her_ , blood on his gloves and against his teeth— 

(Silence from the comms and _please God someone say something_ —) 

“ _You have to come at me like you want me dead_!” There’s a gun in Frank’s hand again, and it’s pressed right back to the welded crack in the helmet. "You think I’m just some asshole going off on whoever I want to? The people I’m killing need to be dead! They call you the devil, and maybe you are, because you look at these men, these murderers and these rapists and these _animals_ , and you smack ‘em around and put them back in the world to kill again, punish the monsters just enough to leave them hungry for more. Because Red,” Frank says, “no matter what you say, you ain’t never been to hell. You’ve never been to hell and had it spit you back up again. You’ve never had a really, truly, _phenomenally_ bad day.” He bares his teeth. “Why don’t we call your girl over here so you can see what it’s like?” 

Matt starts laughing. He can’t stop, not before Frank knocks his head into the brick again, and makes stars burst in the back of his skull. 

.

.

.

_A few minutes ago_. 

“Lilith.” 

Darcy comes to a stop on the edge of the roof. Kate had insisted on coming with her. (Trust us, Claire had said, and when Kate had stepped up to the plate and refused to back down even when Karen had fretted and Foggy had looked from one of them to the other like he thought they might actually start brawling in the middle of the hospital, Darcy had just jerked her head and let her follow along behind.) Foggy’s gone back to her and Matt’s apartment, Darcy’s key pressed into his hand and a promise to wait for news. “Go sleep,” Darcy had said, and the naked relief on Foggy’s face had been so blatant that it had actually twisted a knife into her guts. “I’ll call when I have Matt back." 

Karen had shaken her head when Foggy had asked if she was coming. “I have to look something up,” she’d said. “I’ll meet you there in a little bit.” She’d been wearing the thin-lipped, stubborn look Darcy remembers from the days she’d been investigating Union Allied, and no matter what Darcy could have said, there was no way she would have been able to convince Karen not to do it. Still, Karen had searched her face for a long, quiet moment before pressing her lips to Darcy’s cheek, and walking away, leaving another twist of the knife, another turn of a corkscrew, in her wake. 

She hasn’t said anything to Kate, hasn’t asked her to help, but when they’d gone to change, when they’d slipped into an alley and left their things behind in Claire’s locker, Kate had reached out and gripped her hand so hard that their gloves had caught and squealed together. “You good with this?” she’d said, and Darcy hadn’t been able to say a word, just watched her until her eyes had started to burn. Kate had heard every word of what Castle had told her. She never really had to ask Kate for anything at all. 

She’d squeezed Kate’s fingers hard, and that had been enough of an answer. 

So it’s just her and Kate standing on this roof, the way it used to be at the start, her and Kate. Kate, who she’s never had to hide in front of. Vengeance, not Justice. She turns, and looks at Kate, at the light reflecting off her sunglasses. In the dark, in the faint yellow light from the streetlamps and the gash of moonlight through the clouds, she looks like a too-sharp blade, all elbows and angles. “What?” 

Kate doesn’t say anything. She points. They’ve been spiraling out from the hospital in a circle for the past fifteen minutes or so, looking for shadows, looking for hints. There are any number of people wandering around at this hour, but there aren’t a lot of them in hospital gowns. This one is bare-legged, a thatch of blondish hair and jittery hands as he lifts bricks from a nearby wall, testing the weight of them, the heft. It’s a shadowy corner, and only Hawkeye could have picked it out, really, the flickering and the intent. It’s not a bad plan, really. Steal a car, get out of the city. Flawed, but it works. 

_Right up to the edge, and halfway over_. He’s trying to run. He’s trying to _run_. He’s killed and he’s lied and he’s betrayed them, he’s led them into this, and now he’s trying to run, trying to save his own damn skin, trying to— 

“Want me to shoot him?” 

She snaps back into herself, and breathes. Kate’s voice is all ice. Down below, Grotto’s smashed the window of the car open, and unlocked the door so he can slip inside and fiddle with the alarm. “I can probably pin his hand if you want. Might be a tricky angle.”

( _Think it’s something in you_ , Castle says.) 

( _Trust us_ , Claire says.) 

_The nice one_ , he’d said. _The blind one. And the one that’ll rip your throat out with her teeth._

Darcy turns, and drops onto the fire escape. She swings herself over the railing, hangs out in space, judging her moment. Then, just as Grotto shuts the door of the car behind him, she lets herself fall. 

She lands on the roof of the car with such force that her teeth shake, denting the metal, nearly snapping her ankle. Grotto screams. She doesn’t wait. Darcy hits the button on the baton, and smashes the windshield, shattering it, punching a hole through the driver’s side. He shrieks again, and fumbles for the door. When he sprawls out onto the sidewalk, she’s there to meet him, seizing the back of his scrubs and throwing him back into the driver’s seat. He looks, she thinks, like a bullied child. His eyes are wide and wet, and there’s blood running down his nose and his knobby knees from where he scuffed them on the pavement. 

“Jesus Christ!” He lunges, back for the passenger side, but then Kate drops down on that side and aims an arrow through the glass. He shrieks again. “ _Jesus Christ_!” 

“Going somewhere, Grotto?” It’s Lilith’s voice and beyond, drawling tongues of fire. “After everything people have been doing for you the past few days?” 

“The fuck have I ever done to you, you bitch!” 

Kate hisses, long and low. “Watch your fucking mouth, you bastard.” 

“I haven’t done anything wrong!” Grotto looks from one of them to the other. “I just—I want to get out of town, you know what he’s like, he’ll kill me if I don’t leave, just let me go—” 

She shifts her grip on the baton. She’s biting her tongue hard enough to bleed, looking at him, and _think it’s something in you_ , this man’s killed four people, he’s lied to them, he’s driven them into this corner where all she can do is bite and snap— 

“Lilith,” Kate says, so quietly, and Darcy breathes. Grotto freezes when she whips the baton in, and presses it hard into his throat. Darcy swallows. She has to think, to focus, to make herself speak. 

“Is it true?” 

His eyes are huge. He shakes his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about!” 

A power surge, flaring bright in her chest. She doesn’t think. Darcy flips the baton, snags it out of the air, and slams the point into the side mirror as hard as she can. Plexiglass cracks, shatters, casting shards all over the asphalt. Grotto recoils with another shriek, and draws his knees up against his chest, but she has the baton up against his throat again and she’s half in the car, leaning down, choking him with the weight of it. “Lafayette Street! The old man and his wife, the family on Lafayette Street, did you kill them? _Is it true_?” 

Grotto heaves. There are tears on his cheeks. “I can’t breathe—” 

“Lilith,” Kate says again, and Darcy snaps the baton back, retracts it. She doesn’t wait. She fists both hands up in the collar of his scrubs, yanks him out of the car and throws him to the ground. He makes a noise like a kicked dog, like the dog in Castle’s apartment, and she thinks _Star Destroyer, Boba Fett_ , and he’d been a Brannigan, he’d stood by and watched as that dog had been tortured, he’d taken a gun and killed an entire family, a mother and a father and two children, two teenagers, and she wants to crack his head open on the sidewalk. When she whips her arm back and smashes another window, he doesn’t even scream anymore, just flinches and curls into a tighter ball, waiting for the end. Glass scatters over the back of his scrubs. 

“You killed them!” Her throat should be bleeding. “Tell me you killed them!” 

“They saw me!” Grotto screams back at her. “I didn’t have a choice!” 

( _Trust us_.)

She whips the baton down. 

Grotto goes quiet, and still. 

“Jesus,” says Kate, and skids across the hood of the car. Darcy can’t stop panting. _Could kill someone_ , Betsy had said. Kate doesn’t seem to know what to do. She peels off her bow, her quiver, leaves them on the sidewalk as she presses her ungloved fingers to Grotto’s throat. Her hands are steady, somehow. Darcy shuts her eyes, breathing in shallow bursts. 

It takes her a minute. Darcy can see it when she figures it out, the way her shoulders sag, the way everything holding her up seems to collapse like a soufflé. “He’s alive,” she says, very quietly. Then again. “You left him alive.” 

Darcy turns her back, and looks up at the buildings opposite. There’s someone watching through the window. When they see her looking, they yank the curtains closed. 

“Yeah,” she says, finally. “I did.” 

Kate looks up at her. Her eyes are huge behind her sunglasses. “You could have killed him,” she says. “If you hadn’t pulled back, he’d be dead.” 

She looks down at Grotto. He might not wake up, she thinks. She hasn’t brained him, hasn’t killed him, but she’d hit him hard. Harder than she’s ever hit anyone before. He might never wake up from this, what she’s sent him into, and she can’t bring herself to regret that. _A man. A woman. Two teenagers. A family dead. And you still asked us to put our faith in you. You still asked us to save you, and damn it, we tried_. This isn’t something she’ll regret. “Yeah, well, maybe I should have.” 

She thinks, for a minute, that Kate might take her up on it. Then Kate pushes her sunglasses up into her hair, and looks at her. Sometimes, Darcy thinks, she forgets that Kate Bishop had her rapist in the sights of her bow, and chose to shoot him in the shoulder, instead. 

“Should have, would have, could have,” she says. “You could have killed him, and you didn’t. That’s all.” 

She has to press her hand to her mouth to keep from sobbing. Rage, she thinks, frustration, agony, all of it. There’s not enough room left in her for Kate and Kate’s forgiveness. She blinks, turns away from the car. “We should leave him for the police.” 

Kate’s opening her mouth to speak when they hear it. Applause. Slow and steady. Darcy thinks it’s coming from someone nearby, until Kate puts her fingers to her ears. “Don’t know what you did, Cat,” says Castle, “but it sent your boy into something that looked like a fit. Had to smack him back down. He should be awake by the time you get here.” 

“Oh my god.” Kate covers her mouth with one hand. “Fucking shit.” 

Matt’s been listening. Something roars back up her throat. Darcy stares up at the sky, and pretends that the dampness on her cheeks is nothing but sweat. Matt’s been listening. He’s been awake and listening. Unless it’s a lie, but she doesn’t think it is. Matt’s been awake, and listening. For how long? How much has he heard? Everything since Castle told her about Grotto? Only parts? What had he been asleep for? What had he overheard? 

_He promised me_. 

Vines lunge up into her mouth, curling and poisonous. 

“Meant to tell you when he woke up,” says Castle. He’s panting, like he’s been shouting. “But then I had to whack him again, and it took him a bit. You want to see him? Come to the tenement building across from the Dogs of Hell bar. 44th and 9th. You should be able to find us pretty easy.” Pause. “Just you, and me, and Red, Cat. No birds.” 

It clicks off again. 

“I’m coming with you,” Kate says, immediately. 

“Someone needs to make sure Grote gets into police custody, Hawkeye.” Darcy takes off her glove, and wipes her eyes with her scarred hand. “He needs to pay for what he’s done.” If he ever wakes up. 

“You can’t go up against that bastard alone,” Kate says. “Lilith, he’s been fucking with your head for hours, he’s messed you up, you _can’t_ go alone—” 

“I won’t be alone. Daredevil will be there.” 

“Daredevil’s probably locked in a fucking box and can’t do anything at the moment!” Darcy looks at her. Then, carefully, she takes Kate’s sunglasses from her hair, and settles them back on her nose. Her hands shake. It’s the first time that’s happened in hours. ( _Pretend_ , she thinks. _Pretend_. She can’t help but wonder if she’s fooling anyone, least of all herself.) “Hawkeye,” she says. “Don’t leave him bleeding on the sidewalk with his ass hanging out. Whatever you do after the cops come, that’s up to you. Just get him inside.” 

Kate’s eyebrows creep together. Darcy doesn’t wait for an answer. She steps back, and slips into the nearest alley. 

The bar haunted by the Dogs of Hell—aptly named, she thinks, _Dogs of Hell_ ; it’s like plastering an _X marks the treasure!_ spot on a map for the cops, really, but the bikers at least have the common sense not to pull too much shit around here; they still get warrants served every week and the guys at the 15th draw lots to figure out who has to go get picked by the bikers—isn’t on the corner of 44th and 9th, but a few buildings down. It’s past midnight, now, though by how much she isn’t sure, and aside from one or two people wandering (because it’s New York; people are always wandering) the streets are mostly bare. The tenement across from the bar is quiet, some windows lit, some dark, but when she stands at the edge of the alley and looks at the rooftop there’s a glint of something metallic on the wall. She hasn’t seen a set-up like that before, not in person, not from this far away, but—sniper. A sniper rifle. 

She presses her back to the wall of the bar, and touches her fingers to the comm on her throat. “I don’t know if you can hear me, but don’t react. I think I’m southeast of you, between the bar and the next building over. I’m gonna try to come up the back way. If that rifle’s for me, I don’t want to leave cover.” _If that rifle’s for me, he’s gonna have another thing coming_. There’s a line of motorcycles on the sidewalk. Darcy looks up at the sniper rifle again, at the angle of it, and thinks, ah, shit. “I think he’s gonna try and draw out the gang, keep him distracted.” 

Nothing from the rooftop. Of course, there wouldn’t be. She wets her lips. “When you’re out of this, we’re going to have a talk that you’re not gonna like at all, Matthew.” 

Blocks and blocks away, Kate chokes a little. She doesn’t say anything. Darcy absolutely refuses to think about how much effort must have gone into her keeping her big mouth shut. 

_Trust us_ , Claire had said, and Kate had heard every word of it. _Trust us_ , and she does. That’s not a question. That’s never been a question. They might not match her quite in the way that Matt can, they might not be able to drag her back from the edge as fast, but they do match her. She does trust them. She needs them. She needs all of them. 

_Trust us_. 

“I’m going in,” she says. 

Inside it’s quiet. It’s probably five floors, maybe a little less. Small compared to anything downtown, but it still has security cameras in the lobbies and the stairwells. Lilith and Daredevil have both been caught on camera before, in choppy images and half-glimpses of masks and mouths and “the kind of overdramatic, senseless physical violence that only has a place in a Quentin Tarantino movie.” (Thanks for that one, Ellison.) Still, Darcy keeps her head down as best she can as she heads up the stairs to the fifth floor—not the roof, but the fifth floor—before standing by the window at the end of the hall. No fire escape here, not really. If her spatial memory is right—and her spatial memory is generally shit, but she can at least see out the window and kind of orient herself—then she’s at a window facing west. Castle and his gun are pointing south, towards the bar. (Silence, still, on that front. No bullets, no explosions. Not even a voice.) There’s a service elevator that she’d passed on every floor, heavy doors and thick metal, and yeah, that’s one route, but they’d hear it coming, it doesn't go to the roof anyway, and she’s not all in for the whole _announce I am coming to kick the shit out of you_ thing. 

It’s an older building, though, this one. From the sixties, maybe. There are ledges running around the outside, like balance beams. _Fuck this, fuck this, oh my god, fuck this_ , and she might be spending too much time with Jessica Jones if that’s her first thought when she’s going to do something stupid, but _oh my god, fuck this so hard up the ass right now, seriously_. She heaves the window open, and looks up at the line of the roof. No hand and toe holds from a straight shot, but one window over—and this one is covered with curtains, thank God, the lights out—there’s a fire escape, and God bless New York City for being paranoid about burning down like twentieth century San Francisco. She just, you know. Has to get there. And if she falls, she dies. Like, awful, splattering, bursting death, sudden and irrevocable. _Death is always irrevocable, Darcy, come on_. Her stomach hurts. Of all the jobs in the world that she could have picked, of all the things she could have done with everything she has wrong with her, she had to pick the one thing that meant flipping along rooftops and clinging to walls five stories off of solid ground. _God, okay. This is actually happening_. 

She crosses back and forth in the hall, once, twice. _Come on, come on_. The palms of her hands are slick, her fingers shaky. Then she muffles a scream between her teeth, and heaves herself out the window. 

The ledges look a lot thicker from inside. When you’re standing on them, they feel about the width of a pencil. She balances for a second, her shaking fingers hooked into the window latch. Then, slowly, she stands. Down on the sidewalk, the night had been incredibly still, still sticky with the heat caught in concrete and asphalt, but up here there’s a little breeze tugging at her hair, at her back. She can’t hear anything from the roof, not really. Darcy swallows—it’s reflex more than anything; her mouth’s so dry it could have been shrink-wrapped—and shifts her feet. Her heels are hanging out in space. _Please do not break. Please defy physics and do not break for me, ledge, do not_ — Another shift, and something crumbles, and she freezes, just for a moment. Maybe three feet of space between one ledge and the next, and she had to be short and have stubby little legs and need to stretch out like she’s doing a lunge in order to manage this, didn’t she? She leaves her hand hooked into the edge of the window, and inches over again, until she’s just barely clinging on and she’s braced between one ledge and the next, one foot on either side. The next window is closed. _Come on, Darcy, you have a time limit_. In and out, braced up against the wall, and then she’s stretched as far as she can and seized one of the rails of the fire escape tight enough to hurt, yanking herself across the gap so hard that she clangs against the metal. She can’t breathe over how hard her heart is pounding. _Jesus Christ, you owe me for this, Matt, you owe me so goddamn much for this_ — 

She has to hang there, gagging, for three precious breaths before she can swing herself onto the stairs, and start to creep. 

.

.

.

“How about this,” says Frank, when he wakes for the third time. There’s still tape over his mouth. One of his hands is free of the chains, but it’s layered with duct-tape, his index finger forced into the trigger of a gun. “How about you have a choice, now, Red? Your girl should be here any minute now, and there’s only one or two ways she can make it up here to meet us, so how’s this—one bullet in that gun. And me, I’m sitting here with the rifle on one side, and this—” he holds up another pistol “—on the other. You have a choice here, Red, you either—you either shoot me to keep me from shooting your girl when she shows up, or you get to see how much shit your forgiveness can do after I kill her.” 

The gun’s heavy and cold and the night air tastes like vomit and he can’t breathe, he can’t breathe, because _you don’t touch her_ — 

“Can’t hit me in the arm, or the leg,” says Frank, and it’s half a song, half a lament. “I’m all kitted, Red, have to hit me in the head, have to shoot me in the head to stop me, Red, and it’s up to you what you do, it’s your goddamn choice. You either shoot me, or I shoot her. Up to you.” 

The chains shift and clink against his shoulders. 

“Up to you,” Frank says again, and sits. “Up to you.” 

.

.

.

Up and over. 

She stays low, as quiet as she can. The fire escape’s old, and it creaks, but when she swings over the edge of the building, she’s placed herself at exactly the right angle to put the roof access door between her and Frank Castle. The baton’s clenched tight in her hand. She heaves a breath, and rolls her wrist to loosen it up. On the other side of the roof access door, she thinks, there’s Matt, and then there’s Frank Castle. Someone coughs, and metal clicks together. There’s no other place to hide but this little door, the four walls that stick up in a single, solid point between her and a bullet. She has her baton, she has Castle’s knife strapped to her thigh instead of the taser, and she has her brain and her rage and maybe the barest shred of control left, and that’s…really about it at the moment. When she peers around the corner, she can see chains, and Matt’s boots, and Christ, there’s acid building up in her throat, because _how dare you, how dare you do this to us, how dare you fuck with us like this, how dare you_ — 

She spins her baton again. It’s retracted, at the moment. There’s not a lot she can do from afar, not without her taser. And it’s Castle’s fault that’s broken, too, all of it, she can blame so much of this on him, and even if he is their fault somehow, every damn thing he’s done has been his own choice. Every damn thing. Every part of it. 

_How you gonna do this, Darcy_? 

What does she have? Her baton. The knife. Her anger. And her brain. 

She wets her lips. 

“Hey, there,” she says, loud enough that it echoes. The chains shift again, and there’s a muffled sound. She might have surprised Matt, as well as Castle. Whatever. “Doesn’t seem fair that I come to talk to you all friendly and you’re waiting with a gun.” 

A chair creaks. Boots scuff over concrete. “Cat,” he says. “Guessing you’ve been listening.” 

“Actually,” she says, “I kinda wound up sick of the sound of your voice.” She keeps her back pressed to the wall, listening as hard as she can, but his boots aren’t steel-toed, there’s no click for her to follow. He could be coming from either side. Shit. “Not that I’m saying it’s a bad voice, you know, just—seems like you’re out of practice talking. How long’s it been since you had someone to talk to? You definitely had a lot to say.” 

Castle makes a cracking sound that could be a laugh, if it weren’t broken in two. “Sound pissed, Cat. You wanna come out where I can see you?” 

From the right, she thinks. He sounds louder to the right. “Nah.” Darcy curls her free hand up into a fist against the brick. “Rather keep this between you and whatever gun you have pointed at me right now. Unless you’re not doing that. We could make a game out of it: if you have a gun, clap once. If not, clap twice. Like a magic trick. Or the Puppy Olympics.” 

There’s a tap on the ground that sounds more like a scrape than a footstep. A clink of chains. _Matt_ , she thinks. Matt’s awake, then, at least. Once for yes, she’d said. Twice for no. She’ll probably only be able to get one more question in without Castle noticing, but at least there’s a chance. 

“You talk a lot, usually?” She turns, taps her fingers against the brick. “Just, you know. You’ve spent the past couple of hours talking at me, on and off. When’s the last time you had so much to say?”

“Cut the crap, Cat.” 

“I’m good at crap,” says Darcy. She steps away from his voice, again, and again. “Trust me, I’m really good at crap.” She swallows. “Grotto told the truth, by the way. I asked him really nice.” 

Castle doesn’t say anything, for a moment. “He still alive?” 

“You care?” 

“Told you, Cat. Shit like him needs to die.” 

Bile in her throat. “Sure. Maybe they do. Maybe there are some people who can’t be redeemed, you know? And maybe Grotto’s one of them.” She heaves a breath. “But I don’t kill people.” 

“’cause it’s wrong?” He spits it out. “Sounding like Red, Cat. You on this goodness shtick too? Tried to kill me, Cat, don’t you remember?” 

“I still want to kill you.” Darcy steps back, away from the wall. She spins the baton twice. She can see Matt out of the corner of her eye, and his face is turned towards her, tape over his mouth, and a mass of tape and metal in his hand, what the hell is that, anyway, she can’t tell— “You have—you have no idea how much I want you dead, Frank Castle.” Castle doesn’t say anything, for a moment. Silence. Darcy shifts, and peers around the other side of the roof access door. There’s nothing. 

“I want you dead,” she says again. “You’re a murderer. You’ve put people I care about in danger and I want to kill you for that. I would, if I thought it’d fix a damn thing. But what you do, Castle, you said—you said something about fighting the symptoms, not the disease, and what you do isn’t any different from us. You just spill more blood trying to get at the root.” 

“Better than you.” And he’s too close, all of a sudden, way too close, just around the corner; Darcy presses her back to the door. Matt taps his left foot once, and tips his head, and she edges away again. “Think you do a damn bit of good leaving them alive, Cat?” 

“You shoot them and they die and what does that fix, Castle? Who does that help? The people they’ve killed? They’re still dead. You were in the hospital, you see what the ER was like? Full of people trying to kill each other because they’re scared of what you’re doing, full of innocents getting caught in the crossfire. You’re not making things better, you’re making them worse, just like we are. You wanna help people, Castle? You need to _shut the fuck up_.” 

Matt makes a strangled noise behind the tape. In the same moment, there’s a scuff from behind her, and Darcy whirls. Castle has a gun aimed at her head, but when she ducks, slams her baton into his wrist, the shot goes sideways, ricochets off of the door and shoots off somewhere into the night. Her left ear is ringing, and she can’t hear over the buzz. He fires again, and this time it grazes her, scuffs against the armor at just the right angle to cut. Blood leaks over her ribs. _Matching_ , she thinks, and ducks his next swing, snapping her baton out and driving it into his knee. _Matching scars_. She’d fucked up his leg when she’d hit him with the shotgun, and he’s not fast enough to pivot out of the way. She feels something crumple, vibrate up through the baton, and _kneecap_ , goddamn, she’s smashed his knee. Castle makes a sound like an animal, not a howl but a roar, and backhands her so hard that stars burst in front of her eyes. She hits the ground. The baton goes flying. In the next second, he’s seized her by the hair and dragged her up again, latched an arm around her throat, pressed the gun to her head. “ _Ten seconds, Red_ ,” right into her buzzing ear, and the knife’s still on her thigh but when she goes to grab it he squeezes his arm so tight around her throat that she chokes. She can’t speak. “ _Nine seconds, shoot me, come on_ —” 

“Don’t,” she says, barely audible, squeezing it out, “ _don’t_ —” 

“ _Me or her, Red, show me what you are_ —” 

_You kill him and you become him, don’t do it, don’t_ — 

“ _Seven_ —” 

Matt fires. Castle shoves her to the side as the bullet cracks off the brick behind them, close enough that scraps of brick sting against her cheek. When Matt pulls the trigger again, it echoes with an audible click. In the same moment, an arrow lands in the rooftop. “Shut your eyes,” Kate shouts into her ear, but she’s not quite fast enough; when the flash grenade goes off, her vision goes white. She fumbles the knife up into her hands, and slashes blindly backwards, catching something, cloth and flesh. Castle lets her go. There’s another thunk ( _Kate, firing_ —), and a whip of chains, and then Matt’s up, he’s brushed past her and slammed Castle hard into the wall, and she can barely see, but the idea pops into her head, an epiphany, the stupidest damn idea she’s ever had and maybe the greatest. “ _Hawkeye, the bikes, hit the bikes_ ,” and in the next second there’s a bang so loud that it rattles her teeth in her skull. All those pretty motorcycles, popping one after the other. It doesn’t distract Castle, the explosions—it wouldn’t, not really—but the sound knocks Matt sideways, which, oops. Should have thought about that part. Castle’s eyes are closed and tears are streaming down his cheeks from the flash grenade, and it’s the only thing that gives her enough time to snap around into a kick aiming right for his head. He hears it, or sees it, somehow, because he catches it with one hand and balances on his (fucked up, _fucked_ up) leg to kick her hard in the ribs, driving the breath out of her, a steam train into her guts. Someone snarls—her, Kate, Matt, who knows—and Darcy’s rolled and snapped back up to her feet just as Kate fires again. An arrow sprouts from Castle’s shoulder, from the patch of skin visible at the collar of his jacket. Castle snarls, knocked sideways from the blow. In the next instant, Matt’s on his feet, her baton in his hand, he’s thrown it to her, and it’s both of them this time, two against one. They’re all exhausted, but Castle’s fucked over because of the arrow, he can’t use his hand properly, he can’t balance right on the knee she’s caved, it’s two against one and this time he’s the one scrambling to keep up with them. They drive him back, back and back, and it’s a whirl, it’s smoke and the smell of hot metal even five stories up, it’s the lash of the chain and bruises and screaming bones and a gun clattering onto the floor of the rooftop. Back and back. Matt snaps the chain out, looping it around the ankle of Castle’s good leg, and pulls. When all of Castle’s weight lands on his smashed knee, he snarls, staggers, and she cuts up and in and slams her baton hard across the bone of his jaw. 

Castle drops. He drops, and he stays down, still as Grotto was, breathing and bloody and beaten. Below there’s fire and shouting, and Kate is saying something about angry bikers in her ear, but Castle drops and stays down. Darcy stares at him, at the bruises and the cuts, at the gun and the jacket and the boots, until Matt shifts next to her, and starts to reach out. Then she works her throat, and spits, not on Castle but to the side, onto the concrete. There’s a little pool of blood spreading from where the arrow found its mark, angled oddly through the meat between his throat and shoulder, somewhere that wouldn’t damage him permanently but slowed him down enough to beat. Her lip is bleeding again. The cut on her face from the glass, that’s bloody too. Her hair’s probably sticky from the cut on her head, and her ribs ache, and she wants to bring her baton down onto Castle’s skull, shatter it, brain him for what he’s done, but she looks at him and she spits and she says, “I’m not you, you bastard. _We’re not you_.” 

There’s a single, shivering moment where she thinks about breaking Castle’s nose. Before she can decide, Matt shifts against her shoulder, and pulls her into him. It’s not a hug—she’d kill him if it were a hug, she can’t be touched right now, refuses to let him be tender with her when she wants to rip him apart for doing this to her, when she wants to hurt him for being stupid and for being a hypocrite and for making her angrier than she’s ever been with him before, a cold knot of fury still pressing up against her sternum—but he puts his gloved hand to the back of her neck and pulls her close enough that he can rest his forehead to her temple, that when he breathes out it dusts over her cheek, over the taped cut from the hospital and the bruising, helmet against helmet. She can feel one of the horns pressing into her skull. He breathes, deep and slow, and the chain weighs heavy against her back from where it’s dangling from his wrist, and she breathes. _You’re alive_. Hollow exhales. _I’m alive, you’re alive, and I’m furious with you, but right now this is all I need to know_. 

Darcy shuts her eyes.


	5. Damned If You Do

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please beware. A lot of people have fucked up, and a lot of people yell, and it was incredibly painful to write, so I dunno how it'll be to read. 
> 
> No content warnings that haven't already been posted. 
> 
> Petition for Trish to be like Claire and show up in all Netflix Marvel shows. Petition for Trish to rule the world. 
> 
> As of next chapter, we wrap up Frank('s escapades but not his plot) and get into Elektra! /claps manically 
> 
> Speaking of, I had a few people ask about Frank's actions last chapter, in regards to putting a gun to Darcy's head. My answer for you is: wait until next chapter.

The rest of it is just…shit.

Getting out of the building is probably the worst thing she’s had to do since throwing herself out of a warehouse window to get away from Hironobu Orihara. They drag Castle for the first few floors, stick him in the elevator and leave him unsupervised, and of course they turn around from the absolute avalanche of angry bikers to find him gone, fucked-up knee at all. It’s the way the whole rollercoaster of this entire thing has gone, the past few days all screaming through her mind like a bullet train. One step forward, three steps back. She doesn’t like how fast this has developed, how quickly everything had spiraled so completely apart. Two days for her to question everything. Two days for her to nearly lose it all. Two days to wonder if it had ever had any meaning in the first place.  

Matt’s watching her, in his own way. He doesn’t say a word. He’s always been able to tell when she’s angry, before, but she doesn’t think she’s ever— _ever—_ been this furious with him. The farther they get away from the tenement, from the Dogs of Hell, from Castle and from the agony of the past two days, the colder it gets, spiraling down into a terrible, frozen knot in the back of her mouth. He’s alive, somehow, incredibly, after everything, all the shit he’s pulled and all the crap they’ve had to deal with and all the things he’d said, and _she’d_ said, somehow he’s still alive, and that’s—that’s pretty damn close to everything, right now. But God, she’s so angry with him she can’t even speak. She can’t even _look_ at him, barely can stand to walk next to him, because _you promised and you broke it, you told me you wouldn’t and you did, you said you’d never leave and you almost did and if you say a goddamn word I’m going to be the one to kill you, Matt, I really probably will._ And because he’s Matt, he can probably hear it. Or hear _something_ , anyway, because aside from saying “I’m fine” when Kate asks him if he’s gonna die in the next hour, he keeps his goddamn mouth shut.

Karen’s spread herself across the floor of the living room, shoving the coffee table aside in favor of her photographs and her files. She bolts up off the floor as soon as Darcy wedges the roof access door open, and steps aside to let Kate and Matt in. She’s the one to lock it up again, behind them. “ _Christ,_ ” Karen says, and flies at them both, crashing hard enough into Matt to nearly knock him off his feet. “Christ, we thought you were gonna call, you said you’d call when you had something—”

“Forgot,” says Darcy. Karen takes one look at her, and backs off of the incoming hug. “I need to change. Where’s Foggy?”

“I think you have enough gauze in there to treat an army,” says Foggy, shutting the bathroom door behind him, but he darts forward and hugs Matt too, hard enough that Matt lets out an odd wheezy sound. Foggy yanks back just as fast, and hugs Darcy too, blatantly defying the look on her face and the blood on her cheek. “Jesus Christ, you two, overkill much?”

His voice is trembling.  Darcy fists her hands up by her sides, and then relaxes into him, hiding her face in his shoulder. _Foggy._ She can’t do this without any of them, but she wouldn’t be here without Foggy, not really. Slowly, she curls her fingers into the back of his jacket, and tries to keep her breathing steady. “You’ll get blood on you,” she says, and Foggy just shakes his head.

“You’ve ruined enough of my suits already, I don’t think it matters.”

Behind her, Kate snorts. “You want to talk about weird places to keep gauze, Clint’s place is worse. He keeps first aid shit in the fridge, which, what the hell.” She taps two fingers to Darcy’s shoulder as she passes them, and Darcy draws away from Foggy with a rasping breath, yanking her gloves off and throwing them into the box by the base of the stairs. “You guys bought food, you are _excellent_ humans.”

“I get hungry when I’m nervous,” says not Foggy but Karen. Kate swipes her finger into the bowl of hummus, making happy noises.

“You are good people, Page.”

“Is no one going to explain what happened?” Foggy looks from Darcy to Matt and back again. Darcy presses her mouth tightly closed, and turns away to hide in the bathroom, flinging the top of the Lilith suit out onto the floor. The bandage on her shoulder from the shotgun pellet has crusting blood on it, old enough to have gone brown. She peels it up and away, and hisses at the smears on her skin. Her ribcage is a mottling of bootprints and bruises. “Like—seriously, where’s Castle?”

“Gone,” says Matt. Darcy tears open the antiseptic wipes, and goes at the hole with a viciousness that makes her whole shoulder sting. “He’s pretty badly wounded, he couldn’t have gone very far. Not with his leg the way it is.”

“What happened to his leg?” says Karen.

Darcy looks at the floor.

“Doesn’t matter,” Matt says.

“Like that isn’t ominous,” says Foggy. “What about Grotto?”

“Hospital again.” That’s Kate. “He’s not gonna wake up for a while.”

“You _beat him up_?”

“He’s a murderer,” Kate snaps, before Foggy can do more than yelp. “He probably deserves worse than a stay in intensive care.”

That, of course, has the whole room in a cacophony. Matt hadn’t heard that part, she doesn’t think. He asks a few tight questions— _who did he kill? When?_ —and then falls silent again. Darcy throws her pants into the hallway, too, and kicks the door of the bathroom shut so she can clean the rest of the blood off.

Things have settled by the time she comes back out. She’s careful to keep her eyes away from Matt (Matt out of costume, Matt bruised and beaten looking but alive, Matt in sweatpants and a T-shirt and standing at the end of the couch like he’s waiting for someone to hit him, and the way he tips his head when she passes without touching him makes her think _yeah, you have some kind of clue how pissed I am right now_ ) as she takes the mug of coffee from Karen, shifts into the kitchen to stand shoulder to shoulder with Kate and knock their hipbones together. Kate shifts, and hooks an arm around her waist without looking at her, picking through the bowl of pita chips until she finds one that meets her high standards. “You smell like rubbing alcohol and smoke and it’s gross.”

“Yeah, sure,” says Darcy, and Kate eats her chip. “We need to talk about what’s going to happen from now on.”

“Sleep.” Karen drops down onto the floor again, her shoes off and her ankles tucked together like a motherfucking lady. “First of all, sleep. But I managed to get my hands on the Punisher files. I can definitely go over this. If Castle has some kind of motive it might be something we can find in here. This is everything they have on him so far.”

Kate makes an interested noise. “How the hell did you do that?”

“Tower’s not marching to Reyes’s fife as much as he likes everyone to think.” Karen shifts a few photographs aside. “I’ll keep working on this until I find something.”  

Matt opens his mouth to say something, but Foggy jumps in first. “The DA’s still not gonna be happy that Grotto’s in the hospital. His witpro’s null and void.”

“Who cares,” Darcy says, and Kate digs her nails into Darcy’s waist in a warning.

“The witpro was invalidated as soon as Reyes pulled what she did with the SWAT team, Foggy.” Matt presses his forefinger and thumb to the bridge of his nose. “There was no way we were going to get a new one, and really, there isn’t a good reason for why we should.” 

“Seconded,” says Foggy. She thinks he might be standing on Matt’s foot, because it’s taking a bit of an effort for Matt to peel away from him and circle around to the far side of the couch. “We just need to make sure that Reyes doesn’t find some way to blame that on us.”

“We go down, she goes down,” says Karen, with a grim look. “I talked to Ben while I was out. He’s looking into Reyes’s bullshit. We might be able to drag something up about her that we could use, if she tries to threaten us for any of this.”

“Which I doubt Jen would let fly.” Foggy drops down onto the end of the couch, watching Darcy like a turtle peeking out from under a rock. “You’re really quiet.”

Darcy steps away from Kate, and leaves her coffee mug on the counter. She wants to curl up and lie down, but the adrenalin and the aftermath of the fight are both still thrumming inside her like a beehive. She’s not going to be able to sleep until she drops. “I don’t have a lot to say.”

“You talked to him, you were listening to that damn headset the whole time we were at the hospital, basically, did the guy—did he say anything about why he’s decided to play _Battlefront Hardline_ in the middle of Hell’s Kitchen, or is he just your resident psycho nutjob suffering a fundamental misunderstanding of the right to bear arms?”

“I don’t know what he is,” Matt says. He turns, away from the kitchen, and it’s only then that Darcy makes herself look at him. There are red marks on his jaw and mouth from the tape, and the bruise on his forehead is still awful, nearly black under his hair. The braid of ice in her throat creeps further up, lacing over her tongue. “He’s not—he’s insane, but he’s not completely irrational. I’m not entirely certain why he’s doing this, but he’s not just doing it to kill. There’s something there.”

Darcy picks a pita chip out of the bowl, and crumples it into pieces over the sink.

“Yeah, well, if there _is_ something there, we can probably wait to figure it out until after he’s stopped shooting up the whole neighborhood.” Foggy keeps watching her, and it’s irritating. Darcy draws away from Kate, and goes to the fridge. She doesn’t actually need anything from the fridge, she just doesn’t want to look at Matt’s face. “And I kind of really question whether or not it even matters. He’s killing dozens of people at a time, that’s—there’s no _excuse_ for that, Matt.”

“But there could be a motive,” Karen says. “If—I don’t know. Maybe there’s something there.”

“Whatever the motive is, he’s still killing people, guys, that’s not—I’d rather not have any of us get shot.” When Darcy turns away from the fridge with an apple in her hands, spinning it between her palms, Foggy’s glaring at Matt. “You know, _again_.”

Matt opens his mouth, and shuts it again. Then he says, “Valid.”

“Well,” Foggy says, and then shuts up, staring at Matt open-mouthed. He blinks a few times, points, and then drops his hand again. Then he turns to Karen. “You did actually see that, right?”

“See what?” Karen says vaguely, and pushes her pile of photographs across the carpet again. Foggy looks at Darcy, and then to Kate.

“That _was_ witnessed, wasn’t it?”

“What was?” Kate smirks. “Was I supposed to have been paying attention?”

“Oh, bite me, Bishop,” says Foggy. “Don’t, because ouch, but seriously, bite me. If nobody’s going to acknowledge that Matt just said I was right, basically, I’m going to just…hold this to my chest forever and let it keep me warm at night.”

“Because that’s totally hetero of you,” says Kate. Darcy turns her apple between her hands again. “You sound a little slap-happy, Nelson. You should probably go to bed.”

“We all need sleep.” Matt rubs at his eyes again. “We have to track Castle down while he’s still incapacitated. It’s the only way, right now.”

The frost cracks in her mouth.

“ _We_ ,” Darcy says, enunciating every scrap of it, every possible part, “don’t have to anything. _We_ are not going to be doing anything. _We_ aren’t going to go through this song and dance again.” She digs one fingernail into the skin of the apple, and juice trails down her fingers. “ _We_ aren’t doing a damn thing.”

The whole room goes quiet. On the back of the couch, Matt shifts, and straightens. He’s still fighting to keep his balance, even now, and there’s patterns of ice over the roof of her mouth that make her teeth go sharp. “Darcy,” he says, softly, and icicles crack down her spine. “Don’t.”

“Don’t _what_?” She throws her apple onto the counter. “I can’t even look at you right now.”

Kate’s standing by the knife block, playing with the paring knife. Her eyes dart from Darcy to Matt, and then she scrapes the edge of the blade under one fingernail.

“I know you’re angry,” Matt says, the way someone else might tread around a bomb. “You have a right to be angry, Darcy—”

“I’m not angry.” She’s _freezing._ “Angry doesn’t even begin to come _close_ to what I am at the moment.”

“Um.” Foggy raises his hands, palms out. It might be a warning sign. “I would—guys, we’re all exhausted, we’re tired and we’re stressed and we’ve been scared for hours and hours, can we maybe wait to talk about what we need to do until we can string a coherent sentence together, or—”

“Seems like you need to say something,” Matt snaps back at her, and instead of stinging, it _jabs_ , like a fist to her guts, and she bares her teeth because _oh, okay, that’s how you want to play this?_ Kate spins the paring knife between her fingers, flickering it like a magician would a coin. “Go ahead.”

Foggy squeaks. “I would very, very loudly and emphatically _not suggest doing that_ , either of you, especially not right now—”

“Fine,” Darcy says, and her voice is echoing, as quiet as it is, as level as she sounds, and somehow that shuts them all up faster than if she’d screamed, if she’d thrown things and shrieked and flown at Matt like she wanted to scratch out his eyes. “Fine. You want to know what I have to say? Fine. _What the actual fuck is your damage_?”

Matt’s mouth twists up into the shape that means she’s hit too close to the mark, and he doesn’t want to admit it. “Are you actually asking me or was that just to make a point?”

“I’m not the one who went after a mass murderer alone, with a head injury, and managed to get himself captured on the same day he nearly died, Matt. That wasn’t me, that was you. So yeah, I’m asking you.”

He wets his lips. “I did what I had to do, Darcy.”

“Bullshit.” Her knuckles are bleeding again. “That’s bullshit, Matt. That’s absolute _bullshit._ You didn’t have to do anything. You just wanted to.”

“ _Wanted to?_ ” he says, and she fists her hands up so tight that her arms shake. They’re standing with the kitchen counter between them, jars and glasses and open containers of Mediterranean take-out, and she can’t breathe. She wants to hit him. She wants to lunge at him and slam his head into a wall, because _god fucking damn you, Matt._ “Jesus, Darcy—”

“ _Don’t_.” She’s not sure if her fury is ice or fire, anymore, not the way it’s burning under her skin. “Don’t you _dare_ use that voice on me. You don’t get to talk down to me like I’m an anxious kid, not about this.”

“That’s not—”

“The fuck it isn’t!”

“Since when do mom and dad argue?” says Kate, but she’s high-pitched.

Karen heaves herself to her feet, pale as a ghost. “Um, maybe we should go.”

“No,” Darcy says. “No, stay right there. Maybe if he hears it from more than one person, he’ll _listen_ for once in his goddamn life!”

“Holy shit,” says Foggy.

“You promised me.” Her voice shakes, but it’s not fear, it’s not terror, it’s not tears. There’s smoke stinging at her throat. “You _promised_ me you wouldn’t go after him alone, Matt. You told me to my face that you wouldn’t do it, you told me _to my face_ that you wouldn’t, and I trusted you, damn you, and the first thing you did when my back was turned was break that promise, and _you don’t get to brush that under the table._ ”

“The pair of you were too far away, if I’d stopped to wait then he could have killed someone, he could have killed Foggy, or Karen, there wasn’t any time—”

 “I, for one, am in favor of the not dying thing,” Foggy says, and when she whips around he puts both hands up. “Not that I’m saying that it’s not bullshit, just that I appreciate that there were thoughts in that direction—”

“ _Kate had him_!” For some reason, she’s very aware of how the floor feels under her toes, cold and unyielding. “Kate _had_ him in her sights and she could have done it, she could have knocked the gun from his hand, she could have netted him, she could have knocked him down, she could have _dealt_ with it, and you had to go and be the fucking hero and wind up chained to a fucking pillar and nearly get killed, again, nearly get killed _again—_ ”

“We didn’t have another choice!”

“Kate had the fucking shot! If you hadn’t argued this could have been _over_ by now, we could have had him on the ground, given him to the cops, put him away, get him out of here, stop him from doing this, but now he’s out there still and the pair of us can barely walk—”

“Guys,” says Karen, but neither of them listen.

“You promised you’d never lie to me, Matt, you _swore—_ ”

And _that_ , she thinks, that hits him, because he goes completely, absolutely white, lips fading, all the blood sapped from his face like someone’s drained it away. “I didn’t,” he says, “I didn’t lie to you, goddamn it, it’s not like I planned—”

“I don’t give a shit whether you planned to do it or not!” She does, though, because the thought that he’d told her he wouldn’t, that he’d stood there and kissed her and told her he wouldn’t be reckless when the whole time he was planning to do exactly that, God, that makes her _hurt._ “You made me a promise and you broke it because—I don’t even know why you did it, what the hell did you think you were doing? Were you trying to prove you could beat him, or—or make some kind of point about how different Daredevil and the Punisher are, is that what you were doing—”

“If Kate had shot him, he could have died, Darcy, it would have drawn too much attention and the cops would have opened fire—”

“You know how Kate shoots! This guy has killed _dozens_ of people, Matt—”

“And that doesn’t mean we let other people kill him!”

“ _Hey_ ,” Kate snaps, and shoves between them, still holding the paring knife. Darcy can’t remember circling around the counter and getting right up into Matt’s face, can’t remember shoving him until he nearly loses his balance, but she’s done it, or she must have, because he’s rocking back into her hands with a look like he can’t decide whether or not he wants to bite her or hit her and she’s not sure she disagrees. “First off, you don’t talk about me in front of me. It’s gross and you _don’t_ get to do it, either of you, ever. Understood?”

“Kate,” Matt says, voice tight, but she points at him with the paring knife, and he shuts up.

“Secondly.” Kate has to shout when Darcy opens her mouth. “ _Secondly_. Don’t either of you _ever_ make me choose which order to follow, not ever again. Don’t ever, ever, _ever_ put me into the goddamn position of having to pick, because it was shitty and dangerous as hell and it nearly managed to get us all killed, and both of you—shut up, Matt— _both_ of you were at fault. Don’t _ever_ do it again, Darcy, are we clear on that? Neither of you. Don’t make me have to choose.”

 “Kate—”

“I don’t—”

“ _Are we clear_?” Kate says again, not even loud, just fierce and cold and completely uncompromising.

Matt hisses. “We’re clear.”

“Good.” She seizes Darcy by the arm. “You come with me.”

“Kate—”

“You’re running hot, you haven’t slept in two days, you’re going to kill each other, and we’re gonna be the ones to have to clean up the bodies, so this is an executive order from me to you that you are going to shut up, and you are going to come with me, and if one or the both of you manage to get your shit together in the next few hours _maybe_ I’ll put you back in the same room, but for now, you are grounded, because in three days when you cool off you both are going to hate yourselves for some of the things you want to say and that is really not okay with any of us.”

“I don’t—”

“Shut _up_.” She glares at Foggy. “Don’t let him out of your sight.”

Foggy sets his face into hard lines. He looks grim, actually grim, and it’s odd, hanging on him. But also not, because God, she’s seen that grim look a hundred times over the past eight years. That’s the look he wears before he drops a truth bomb into someone’s lap, like a radioactive kitten. “Can do.”

“We can manage him,” says Karen. “Go.”

Matt actually spits a little, catching a snarl between his teeth. “I don’t need to be _managed_ —”

Karen snorts. “Don’t even go there, Matt.”

“Jesus Christ—”

“You were just kidnapped, Mr. Brain Damage, you are not going anywhere right now.” Foggy darts in the way. “Sit your ass down.”

“Foggy—”

“ _Sit down_.”

“Kate—” Darcy says again, but Kate yanks, hard enough to make her stagger.

“Walk it off, Lewis,” Kate says. “Walk it off, take a breath, don’t you fucking argue with me—”

“I don’t—”

“Walk it _off_.”

They’re nearly an hour into the march—Darcy’s wrenched her arm away from Kate’s so she can walk on her own, barefoot, in sweatpants and a tank top, bruised and cut to shit and probably way too exposed, even at ass o’clock in the morning—by the time Darcy finally realizes where they’re going. Fogwell’s Gym is close to the apartment, yes, even by city standards, but Kate uses a second gym when she goes to her classes with the martial artists she’s wrangled out of nowhere, a twenty-four hour place on the border of Columbia. They’ve made the walk before, but it’s a long one, and usually in this weather it means that they take cabs or the subway. Darcy had barely even noticed. She thinks she might have stepped on a bit of broken glass; there’s a stinging in the ball of her foot that isn’t natural. “What the fuck are we doing here, Kate?”

“You have two options right now,” Kate says, and swipes her keycard. “Either you beat the shit out of a punching bag until you’re so tired you can’t actually shout anymore, or you let me knock you out right now with a sleeping pill and when you wake up, you beat the shit out of a punching bag until you’re so tired you can’t actually shout anymore.”

“Kate—”

“Those are some good options, there, Lewis. I could have just gone straight to _knock you out and tie you up until you settle_ , but I decided not to, because I’m a good bro, and good bros don’t knock their bros out with narcotics.” She pinches her lip. “Without advance warning.”

Kate holds the door open. Darcy stalks by her, and into the building. She’s smearing red on the tile. “I don’t need a goddamn lecture.”

“You think I’m gonna lecture you?” Kate smacks the elevator button, and waves at the security guard behind the counter. Clearly, Kate showing up with people who look like they’ve been wound through a meat grinder isn’t uncommon, because the guy just grunts, nods at her, and ruffles his newspaper out again. “Please. That takes effort. I’m just here to make sure you don’t actually stab someone.”

Her teeth crack against each other. “ _He lied to me,_ Kate.”

“He broke a promise, yeah.” Kate bounces on the balls of her feet. The elevator doors slide open. “Come on. Fourteenth floor.”

There’s a security guard on this floor, too, and though he gives Darcy a careful look (the bandages on her hand are bloody again) he just nods at Kate, and vanishes into the staff room. Sometimes it seems like Kate Bishop has the entire city on her payroll, and it can be phenomenally frustrating.

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” Kate says. “You do what you need to do in here. When you’re done, you come get me. You’re not going back to the apartment tonight. You’ll stay in my guest room.”

“Kate—”

“He’s not gonna go anywhere, Darcy. You think Foggy and Karen are going to let him? They’ll tie him up if they have to, but if you go back there you’re going to wind up fighting again, and that’s the absolute last thing any of us need right now.”

“I don’t—”

“This is the plan,” Kate says, talking over her. “Tomorrow morning, when you wake up, you’re going to come out for coffee with me and Trish. You’re going to let her fuss over your bruises, and you’re going to keep your mouth shut, and if you need to beat the shit out of something again, you can do that. Trish has been looking for a sparring partner anyway.” Kate crosses her arms. “After that, if I think you're up to it, we’re going into the office so the pair of you can have an actual, adult discussion, possibly with shouting, about the bullshit that Matt pulled tonight. But if I think you’re going to go back to incoherent screaming, then I’m going to drag you right back out of there and we can do this all over again. And it’s not a punishment, before you even go there. This is me trying to keep you from doing something that you’re going to regret in a day, or a week, or a month, or a year.”

God, she wants to _bite._ “Kate, _he promised me._ He swore he never would lie to me again and he fucking lied to me and he nearly managed to get himself killed—”

“Yeah, and give him hell for it. Don’t let him get away with it. I’ll beat the shit out of him, Karen will beat the shit out of him, I’m guessing Jen will, too, even if she doesn’t know what happened, and I don’t even want to think about what Foggy’s going to do. He might have pled neutrality in your fights, Darcy, but Jesus, I think he actually wants to stab Matt in the eyeball himself right now, there’s more than a little displacement going into this one.”

“Off-topic,” Darcy snaps, and digs the scrap of glass out of her foot. When she looks up again, Kate’s produced a band-aid and an antiseptic wipe from exactly nowhere on this earth. “Where—”

“Clint does stupid shit,” she says. “I keep them on me.”

“ _Where_ on you?”

“I have hidden pockets, before you get weird.”

Darcy sits down hard on the bench, and rubs at the cut on her foot. Kate watches her do it, quietly, her thumbs still hooked into her pockets. “He promised me,” Darcy says again, and throws the used-up antiseptic wipe onto the ground. “He fucking promised me he wouldn’t do anything stupid, that he’d back off, that he wouldn’t go after Castle alone, and he did _all_ of those things as soon as he thought he could get away with it, and he nearly managed to get himself killed twice in two days because of it and I am _so fucking angry with him_ , Kate, I can’t even fucking breathe—”

“So beat the unholy hell out of him,” Kate says. “He was stupid, he was reckless, he broke a promise and yeah, you know what, he deserves to get whacked with a shovel. But if you’d had that fight right now, when both of you are running on days without sleep, after everything that happened the past two days with Grotto and Castle and Reyes and the whole damn avalanche of shit that we’ve been trying to climb out of, when you can barely even stand without tipping over, then I promise you, it would have gone so sideways that the whole world would have inverted. And I think that even with how pissed you are right now, you’re not pissed enough to end the relationship. Unless I’m wrong, and you do want out, but that seems like the most extreme option possible here. ” Kate leans back against the counter. “Which, to be fair, the pair of you tend to opt for.”

Darcy slaps the band-aid on over the ball of her foot, and stands again. This place is much more high-tech than Fogwell’s, much less driven by boxing. There are standing bicycles, a few heavier bags. One of the little teardrop-shaped things that are supposed to be at someone’s eye-level, the ones she can never remember the name of. A ballet bar. A wide open space for sparring. Weight machines. She tests her weight on her cut foot, and shifts back and forth.

“You gonna break up with him?” Kate says.

It’s a shock of cold water in her face. _No._ It’s on her tongue. Her first instinct, the rawest one, the thing that leaps up inside her bones. She’s pissed as hell. She’s never, ever been so angry with him before, never wanted to rage and scream and shout at him like this before, never been so absolutely furious that she couldn’t actually find the words. But she can’t turn around and say, _I’m ending this._ She _can’t_. She’s known him for so long that he’s a part of her, and she loves him in a way she can’t even begin to explain, even to herself, and just the idea of it—no. That’s like asking her to cut her own arm off. Her arm, or her leg. Peel her heart out of her chest. She swallows. “Christ, Kate.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“ _Jesus,_ no, I’m not—”

She stops. Kate, for some reason, looks satisfied.

“Think you needed to hear yourself say it,” she says. “Just to be sure.”

Her foot stings when she leaves her full weight on it. “Kate.”

“Go hit something, Lewis,” Kate says. “I’ll be back in an hour. If you break anything in here, you’re the one who’s gonna pay for it, not me.”

She’s gone before Darcy can blink. It takes a few minutes before Darcy can work up the courage to pick a bag, and start throwing punches.

.

.

.

The sun’s shining into the guest bedroom and right in her face when she finally wakes up. Darcy shifts, and nearly whines. Every muscle in her body is stiff, unyielding. It’s as if someone’s cut her open and replaced her insides with sticks. Her face hurts, and her hand, Jesus, maybe continuing to punch things with fucked-up knuckles had been a really bad idea because her hand is actually throbbing, and her ribs have the same dull ache they always do when someone manages to kick her in the chest. The pants that Kate had spotted her after they’d finally trundled into the Park Avenue apartment at maybe four in the morning are too big, catching oddly on her hips, and when she shifts, the collar of the T-shirt (actually, she thinks this might be one of Clint’s shirts; it’s purple and has a weird stain on the hem) catches around her throat. The clock reads 9:42. She puts a hand over her eyes, and groans. “Kate.”

It takes a minute. Kate sticks her head in, toothbrush sticking out of her mouth. Her hair’s up in a messy bun, and her sleep shorts have Pac-Man on them. “Whazzit.”

“I need to be at work in ten minutes.”

“It’s Sunday, first of all, which you would know if you had actually slept at all in the past few days. There’s no work on Sundays. There’s no work on Saturdays, either, in a rational world, but the world you live in is clearly irrational otherwise you—” Kate points at her with the (purple) toothbrush “—wouldn’t be here in the first place.”

She can’t handle this crap this early in the morning. “Lemme alone.”

“Nope. We have a morning meeting.”

“I don’t have a meeting. It’s Sunday.”

“We’re having coffee with Trish, remember?” Kate has white foam at the corners of her lips, like she’s rabid. _Not an image I needed, brain._ She sticks her toothbrush back in her mouth. “Besides,” she adds, muffled, “I already went and grabbed all the paperwork for the Guerra thing, so if you want to write your complaint out of the office, then that is totally something you can do. By the way, I’ve already had another call from Jess. Apparently the news about the Dogs of Hell getting their asses handed to them has been spreading. Twitter’s flipping a shit again.”

Darcy yanks the blankets up over her face (unlike Matt’s apartment, the air conditioner in Kate’s place actually works, and she has it set inhumanely low; trying to turn it off means Kate bites) and whines in the back of her throat. “I don’t want to talk to Twitter.”

“I can always tweet for you, I know the password to the Lilith account.”

Well, that’s encouraging. “Do I want to know how you found that one out?”

“Darcy, the forgotten password hint was _why._ It was pretty obvious the actual password was gonna be _because fuck you, that’s why._ With a one in the middle and like…two exclamation marks. It only took me a couple tries.”

She glares at the weave of the blanket. “Fine. _Fine._ I’ll talk to Twitter. Go—go fuck yourself.”

“Do that already,” Kate says, and trots off.

“That is _way more_ than I _ever_ needed to know, Kate Bishop!” Darcy shouts after her. There’s only a bit of cackling from the bathroom. Darcy hides in the pillows— _come on, Lewis—_ and then heaves her bruised, achey, old-lady self up out of the bed so she can change.

She’s still wearing Kate’s clothes (well, Kate’s baggiest clothes, because the boob difference between Kate Bishop and Darcy Lewis is actually insane) when they head for Joe’s Cups. It’s one of those swanky newer places that always give Darcy hives to look at, shining chrome and very white vinyl seats, minimalist design and a coffee bar like an MC Escher stairwell (seriously, it’s weird as fuck). Trish Walker has settled at the end of the bar with an iPad, her legs crossed neatly at the knee and wearing a pair of heels that look like they could kill a man. She’s kitted up like she’s going to go into work, pencil skirt and button down, but that’s both gross and unacceptable because Sundays. Especially Sundays in August where the temperature outside is still cracking a hundred, even after the thunderstorm at three AM. (Walking home in that had been fun, for sure.) 

“’sup,” says Kate, and she and Trish do that Parisian style cheek-kiss thing. It looks weird on Kate, considering she’s in a tank-top and shorts and has a tattoo on the back of her shoulder of a bull’s eye, and Trish is, you know, Trish, but they do it, and then Kate pulls out the next stool over. “I brought someone, hope you don’t mind.”

“Oh my god,” says Trish, and bounces off the seat to hug her. Darcy’s too emotionally exhausted to push her away. “Of course I don’t mind—Darcy, what happened to your face?”

“Can we not talk about it? Because it’s all anybody wants to talk about.”

“Oh,” says Trish. She doesn’t pull back, though. She smells, Darcy thinks, like bergamot. “ _That_ happened to your face.” When she leans back, she gives Darcy a much more professional, clinical look. “Bad?”

( _Bang._ )

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she says, finally. Darcy eyes the mugs on the counter. “Do you think the baristas will throw me out if I have to pay with dimes?”

“I’ll buy it.” Trish waves her hand. “Don’t argue with me, Darcy. The barista’s the type to ignore you entirely if you come in looking like anything less than a runway model, and plus, you know, if that—” she points at Darcy’s nose with one perfectly manicured finger “—happened how I think it did, then I’m pretty sure a lot of people in this city can owe you a coffee or two.”

She feels like a fish. She can’t quite work out what to say. “Trish—”

“You can owe me if you want,” Trish adds, and waves at the barista. It’s actually a coffee _bar_ , which is the weirdest thing Darcy’s seen. _God fucking bless New York._ “You can buy mine the next time I see you. It goes around.”

That, at least, is a deal she can accept. “What are you drinking?”

Darcy worked in a Starbucks all through undergrad, and she _still_ has no idea how to even begin to parse out all the words that Trish throws at the barista behind the counter. It’s about as comprehensible as mermish, but when he brings the mug back—giving it to Trish, not to Darcy, the rude shit—the coffee she gets is…coffee. Guatemalan if she’s not wrong. Also, expensive as fuck, but like…Guatemalan coffee. _You were so excited to prove you could,_ Darcy thinks, looking at the completely incomprehensible, Starbucks-on-steroids names of things on the board, _that you didn’t stop to think about whether or not you should, did you, Joe’s Cup?_

This is, apparently, a weekly ritual for Trish and Kate. They talk in circles, dropping names Darcy’s only ever heard in passing, talking about benefits and media campaigns and donations. Kate used to hang around the _Daily Bulletin_ a lot, back when Ben had worked there, and she knows a little more about the ins-and-outs of media and news reporting than she likes to let on. Trish, with her radio show, comes in at different angles, but it’s all still news, all still media, and it fades into a gentle wash in her ears, like water on a beach. Darcy holds her mug in her scarred hand (her bandages are making things hard) and stops paying attention after a while, cocking her split eyebrow at the barista behind the counter when she catches him staring. (He ducks his head and turns away very fast. She can’t help but think he’s scared she’ll beat him up.) Five hours of sleep last night, she thinks, hard enough and deep enough that waking up had made her feel like she was clawing out of dark water. Then maybe an hour, yesterday afternoon, and then before that four hours, plus probable concussion, and…yeah. She’s kind of dazed. She wants to go home and get back into bed and sleep until all her problems go away.

_Because that always works, Darcy._

Shit. The cold hard knot of anger is still there, hunched in the back of her throat, ready to pounce. _Shit._ She’s supposed to be on top of her shit, isn’t she? She’s an adult. She’s supposed to be able to manage things, juggle a job and a relationship and family and friendships and a _life._ (The night job thing makes that way more complicated, let’s be real, but still.) She’d been able to manage it, before, even if it had only been by the skin of her teeth. And in two days it’s all spun completely out of control, bursting between her hands like a grenade, cutting her to pieces with the shrapnel. Castle, and Grotto, and Matt, and yeah, herself, too, slipping along the black ice left behind by Frank Castle and cracking her head open on the pavement. _I could have killed someone last night. God, I wanted to._ She’d come so goddamn close, and it had been an actual miracle that she hadn’t, and Matt had nearly died, _twice_ , he’d lied to her and gone barreling ahead with his damn stubborn idiotic ideas of what he can manage and not being able to fucking trust them to get things done on their own and she wants to _hurt_ him—

In the light of day—not the cold light, because it’s still hot as Satan’s balls outside, but still, the light—she looks at the bruises on her hands and wrists and forearms and fights the urge to put her head on the countertop. He’d promised her he wouldn’t do anything reckless, that he’d keep out of the way, but if he’d asked her to do the same thing, would she have listened? Would she have done the same thing he did? And the line between truth and lie, here…she’s not sure where it steps over. Because she _knows_ Matt. She thinks she might know him better than anyone alive right now, and he’d meant it, when he’d promised her. And if it’d been two days ago, if he’d been healthy and she hadn’t nearly lost him, she wouldn’t have had a second thought about him getting Frank Castle off the tower, even if Kate _had_ had the shot, because—because of a lot of reasons. Because as much as she hates to admit it, Matt hadn’t actually been wrong when he’d said shooting Castle down might have drawn fire from the cops and put all of them in serious jeopardy.

_Which doesn’t excuse any of it._

No, it doesn’t. She just—she hates fighting with Matt. She _hates_ fighting with Matt. The ice in her throat doesn’t fade, thinking about it, she’s still just as pissed and has just as much of a _right_ to be pissed as she did last night, but she just—she hates fighting with him. She’d been shit at it a year ago when she’d had just as much cause, and she’s shit at it now, because even with how angry she is, even though she thinks actually seeing him right now would make her scream and rant and rage and shatter every mug in this goddamn snooty coffee bar, she just—she wants to shake him until he understands why she’s so angry, and she wants to hold onto him, and she wants to _hurt_ him, damn it, because she’s not even sure how deep the cut from this has run, how far it goes. Like someone’s slipped a razor down her throat and it’s opening her up further with every breath. _I trusted you, damn you, and you turned around and did exactly what I asked you not to do, and that hurts._ God, sometimes she just wishes she could get into people’s heads and make them think like her, make them understand where she’s coming from.

(Trish says something, laughs, and Darcy snaps out of her daze just enough to remember everything she’s heard about Jess from Trish, everything she knows about Kilgrave and what happened a few months ago. The sick, oily guilt, the utter revulsion, hits her hard in the stomach, because _no, not like that, Jesus, no_. Not like him. Not ever like him.)

She’s just not good at talking, she’s good at letting all her problems fester until they burst, and maybe everything with Castle had cropped up out of nowhere, but—but maybe some of the fight with her and Matt, maybe that’s been percolating for a long time. Since the start, maybe. Matt and his hero complex. Darcy and her need for control, her incessant, burning craving to _fix_ things, just—Jesus.

She hates sleeping on things. It gives her perspectives that she wouldn’t have had if she’d just bulldozed ahead and finished the goddamn fight in the first place. They’re control freaks, the pair of them, and even after nearly a year sometimes she’ll look at him and it scares the living shit out of her that he has so much influence over her, that he can make her happy or destroy her so fucking easily, with a word, with a smile. She’s not built for long relationships just because it’s so goddamn hard to give someone that much power. And it’s mutual, she thinks. She thinks of how white he’d gone when she’d said it, _you lied to me, Matt_ (because a year ago she’d told him if he ever lied to her, if he _ever_ lied to her, she’d be done, and that there wouldn’t be a second chance) and knows. Yeah. It’s mutual. Matt, control freak Matt, Matt with his strict rules and his iron-clad conceptions of reality and morality: Matt’s just as scared of what she can do to him as she is of what he can do to her. Matt’s just as scared—she thinks; she hopes; she used to know, but now she’s not entirely sure—to be without her as she is to be without him, because God, they’ve known each other for eight years, she doesn’t actually remember the way it felt to live life before she knew Matt, he’s the one person who’s ever known all her secrets and she’s so angry with him right now she could actually beat the shit out of him.

_Doesn’t mean he didn’t break his promise._

( _Bang,_ and she’d nearly lost him, and all of it’s mixing up inside, she’d come so close to the edge and she’d walked away from it, she wants to hurt him and snarl at him and _scream_ but she also can’t get the image of last night out of her head, because Castle had had a gun to her temple in spite of everything he'd said about people who deserved to die and he'd said _shoot me, me or her,_ and Matt had _done it_ —)

“You look like you’re thinking really hard.”

Darcy looks up from the coffee mug. Trish is watching her, chin propped in her hand. On Trish’s other side, Kate’s fiddling around with her phone (she’s tweeting; Darcy’s phone buzzes in her pocket with the notifications coming in) and not paying attention, or pretending not to, at least. “Hm?”

Trish settles her cup back onto the bar. “You doing okay?”

“She had a fight with her partner-in-crime,” says Kate, before Darcy can come up with an excuse. She wants desperately to kick Kate Bishop in the stomach, but she’s too far off.

“Ah,” says Trish, knowingly. “Before or after the nose?”

“After the nose.”

“I can speak for myself,” Darcy says.

“Now you know how it feels to have someone talk about you in front of you,” Kate says. Her smile’s sharp enough to cut. “It’s the shits, isn’t it?”

Trish makes a little gesture with her fingers that looks more like a _come at me, bro_ thing to Darcy than anything, but it shuts Kate up, somehow. “You want to talk about it?”

“Not really.” Darcy scowls at Kate. “Is this why you dragged me out to this? For couples’ therapy?”

“Couples’ therapy involves an actual couple most of the time, not just half of one.” Kate shrugs. “Think about it, though, Lewis. Trish might have hard-hitting news and opinion segments, but _TrishTalk_ does a lot of interpersonal stuff too. The Friday shows are always dating related.”

Trish wrinkles her nose. “I keep trying to get that one discontinued, but the network gets antsy when they hear about a woman-led, woman-run show that _doesn’t_ involve romance or whatever, so I have to keep it. For now,” she adds, darkly, and Darcy tries very hard not to think about a Trish Walker on the side of Bad Things, because a Dark Side!Trish would actually be terrifying. The only person who might scare her more, treading onto the Dark Side of the Force, would be Karen. Which…holy shit.

“Anyway,” says Trish. “I mean, I generally get experts in interpersonal relationships to do that part, and it’s only a fifteen minute segment every Friday, but most couples seem to have the same problems, so far as I can tell. Not talking about things, not discussing boundaries, stepping on each other’s toes, not cultivating healthy relationships outside of the significant other.” She glances from Darcy to Kate, and then says, “I don’t think that last one would be your problem.” 

“It’s cute that you think my relationships are healthy,” says Darcy, and Kate snorts into her mug.

“Aren’t they?” Trish leans back on the stool. “I mean, you have friends, you have your job, you try to keep it together most of the time even with your krav maga accidents—”

“That’s a much better term for it than Chinatown, _thank_ you, I’ve been trying to come up with something—”

Trish waves that off. “If anything, you’re much more well-adjusted than anyone could expect, considering what you do with your life and who you do it with. Is this the first time you guys have actually, you know, had a big fight?”

Darcy gags on her mouthful of coffee. “Seriously, Trish, I didn’t come out here for therapy.”

“I’m not looking to give it. Last guy I dated turned out to be a psychotic ex-military drug addict with rage issues, I’m not anywhere near a place where I can be giving advice about healthy relationships. But, you know, I can listen, if you need that right now.” Trish swirls her coffee in her mug. “You mind if I ask what he did?”

She might actually rather swallow acid than talk about this too much with anyone, but…Trish. Trish isn’t actually a part of their little group or team or whatever it is; she doesn’t see Trish more than once a month, doesn’t talk to her much outside of a few text streams about puppy videos and maybe asking for a Jessica translation, and Trish…might actually be the best candidate to not blow up on her, to be honest. Darcy rubs at her eyes (carefully, very carefully, because her nose still feels like shit) and watches the barista putter around the other end of the counter. His nametag says _Eduardo_ , which is a blast from the proverbial past that she really does not want in her head right now.

“He promised me he wouldn’t do something and he did,” Darcy says. She shifts her bandaged fingers on her mug. “And it, um. We have a really—really aggressive client. And I told Matt to stay out of the guy’s way, because they’ve already fought—argued once, and it ended badly. Like…really badly, nearly wrecked the case badly, nearly ended his career badly. And he promised me he would. And last—yesterday he went after the client anyway, and—and it really could have ruined everything.”

Trish glances at Kate, and then says, “Ah.”

“He promised me he wouldn’t,” she says, and she sounds like a broken record, but this is the sticking point, _this_ is the worst part. “He promised me, and he did it anyway, and I don’t know if it’s because he—he didn’t think the promise was worth anything or because he’s stubborn or because he’s actually crazy or because of something else entirely, and I think I’m gonna actually smash his head through the wall if I see him today, and I just—I don’t want to talk about it.”

At the other end of the counter, Eduardo the barista starts flirting with a redhead in a mini-dress. He doesn’t look anything like the Eduardo Darcy dated during 1L—he’s much skinnier, a lot taller, and his hair is artfully shaved and bleached instead of dark and tied back—but the name’s pissing her off. The redhead with the curly hair loops her arm through her friend’s—a platinum blonde in knee-high tan boots and what looks like a lab coat—and gives the barista the middle finger before the pair of them vanish out the front doors again. 

Trish snitches a sugar packet out of the basket when the barista goes to wash one of his mixers, and adds it to her latte. “You think he did it on purpose?”   

“The aggressive client?”

“Matt.”

“Break the promise?”

“Mm.”

Back with the fish face, her lips parting and no sound coming out. Darcy crosses her legs. “I’m—I’m good at telling when he’s lying, and when he promised, he didn’t—it wasn’t—”

“He wasn’t lying when he promised you he wouldn’t,” Trish says, and Darcy nods, hard enough that her head aches. _Stupid concussion. Go away._

“Yes,” she says. “That. I can’t English. But that.”

“So he made the promise, and he meant it, and then later he went after this client of yours anyway?”

Kate mimes an explosion with her hands, and then says, “The huge, shredded, eight-pack client with lots of pointy objects and boom-boom sticks.”

Trish scrunches her nose up. It’s her way of smiling without smiling. “Adam Driver appreciates you.”

“He’d better. I still want to date him.”

“He’s a bit young for you, isn’t he? Only in his thirties.”

Kate rears back. “Bite me.”

Darcy doesn’t really have any more words at the moment. She knocks the heel of her shoe against the barstool, not looking at either of them anymore.

“Why do you think he broke it?” Trish says, carefully. Darcy coughs.

“I don’t know if I care much at the moment, to be honest. He did. He could have—he could have ended everything and he did it anyway. It still happened, no matter what his motives were.” She swallows. “He still—I don’t know.”

“Well, yes. But why might help you come to better terms with it.” Trish shrugs. “Or not, y’know. Like I said, I’m not really good at this. I don’t think anyone our age is. Or anyone any age is.”

Kate says, “Word.”

“This isn’t your not-therapy session, Kate.” Trish pushes at her with two fingers. “You stay out of it.”

“Fine.”

“He meant it,” Darcy says. “At the time, when he promised me. He meant it. And just—he broke it, but he meant it, and it nearly ended with—with both of us losing everything, and I don’t know _why_. It’s like—it’s like he was trying to fuck up, and I don’t get it. I _don’t_ get it.” And, because she thinks she might spit or cry or break or something if she doesn’t say it: “I want to smash his head in with a hammer.”

“Which is probably a natural reaction, though the violence is a little extreme.” She hooks a strand of blonde hair behind her ear. “I don’t really know what to say other than, you know. Communication is important. The only way you’re really going to be able to answer that question is if you ask him.”

“And then smash his head in with a hammer, because that’s what’s going to happen if I’m in the same room as him right now.” Because _Christ_ , she’s still furious—not the cold fury from Grotto and Castle, not the edge-of-her-teeth, barely hanging on, end of the line rage that had kept her running last night, but just—anger like she’s been stung by a scorpion, like she’d put her hands out to a dog she’d thought she could trust and it had bitten her, anger laced through with pain, and that’s a completely different breed. Trish clicks her tongue between her teeth.

“And then smash his head in with a hammer.”

Darcy pulls a handful of napkins from the dispenser, and starts to shred them into tiny pieces. She’s through about two napkins, and has three left to go, when Trish clears her throat again. “I know you probably have a lot of people saying this, but just—if you need someone to talk to about this, Darcy, you can call me. When you’re ready to talk about it in more detail.”

She looks up from her pile of ripped-up napkin, and frowns. “Trish—”

“I know you don’t know me all that well, but just—” Trish digs through her purse for her compact mirror, fixes her lipstick. “I don’t know the circumstances, no, and I don’t know Matt all that well either—I’ve met him, what, once?—but I can tell you that I’ve had a self-destructive personality in my life since I was about sixteen. It’s not the same thing, obviously, but—I don’t know.” She sighs. “It’s like—you love them, for a lot of reasons, but it’s exhausting sometimes. Watching them fuck themselves over. Watching them hurt themselves, or you. Being angry, and forgiving them, or being angry and not forgiving them but coming back to them anyway, or—or whatever it is you decide to do. And I know how much it can hurt, watching them mess up, and—and living through the aftermath. So if you need someone to talk to, you can call me. All right?”    

Her tongue sticks. Darcy takes another sip of her coffee, not quite able to look at Trish anymore. Her phone buzzes in her back pocket again. Kate’s still going off on Hero Watch. As long as she does it on her personal account, and not the professional one, Darcy really doesn’t care what she says. She swipes into her Lilith account, and just posts a smiley face before signing off again. There’s nothing openly connecting Lilith with the account, aside from the implication that it is, you know, Lilith the vigilante behind the anon-face in the profile picture, and since she hasn’t posted anything like _I’m gonna go beat up a guy now_ the police still haven’t had quite enough to execute a warrant on it, but she tries to be careful about it anyway. She barely replies to anyone at all, anymore, and when she does post things, they’re vague enough that you can read them half a dozen different ways.

Well, aside from the one thing she’d posted blasting the NYPD for being racist dickweeds, but she’d retweeted that from The Daily Show, so whatever.

“I know,” she says, finally. Trish snaps her compact shut. “Thanks, Trish.”

Trish shifts off of her stool. “Come on,” she says. “I want to go hit something. Even with your hand fucked up the way it is, it’d probably help take some of the edge off. If you’re not too tired.”

“If your gym is air conditioned, then I’m all for it,” Darcy says, and flips off Eduardo the snooty barista as she goes.

.

.

.

She stays at Kate’s again that night. Foggy, apparently, has managed to pin Matt down in his own apartment, either with so it’s not like Matt is there, but she just—she doesn’t want to go home. Tomorrow, she thinks, she’ll be able to manage it, but tonight, no. If she goes back tonight, then she’s either going to break down into tears or hit Matt hard enough in the head to actually damage his brain permanently, and she doesn’t think she can handle that idea.

The next morning is Monday (Jesus, Monday). She packs up her things, and drops them off at the apartment—the empty apartment, because Matt’s gone, and his shoes are gone, even if the cracked helmet is still in the closet under the stairs where it should be—before wandering in to work to finish Marisol’s complaint. _File today,_ she thinks. File against the Manhattan School of Music, and start actually doing things to make the money Marisol had insisted on paying them worth something. Go back and see if she can’t push the guy suing Marino over the bar fight into putting his tail back between his legs and back down. (Apparently, he’d insulted Marino’s boyfriend and called them both a pair of twinks, which…considering the size of Marino’s biceps hadn’t been a good idea, in Darcy’s opinion, but it gives her a lot of fodder in regards to getting the charges dropped. The guy’s lawyer seems to agree with her, at any rate, judging by the way he’d eyed his client when that snippet of detail had come forward.)

Matt’s not in. He was, at some point—his bag is here, and the text-to-speech reader is out on the top of his desk—but he isn’t now. He’s out with Foggy, she thinks, and when Karen looks up from her coffee and says something about a courthouse visit for Jacinto and a guy named Dupre or diPresto or something, she’s not sure, she stops paying attention as soon as Karen says “they’ll be back in a few hours.” Darcy nods, and shuts herself up in the office with her headphones in to at least draft out the complaint. Working—crafting out the familiar forms, going over the details, going through civil rights law for fodder—that’s soothing. That’s familiar, and soothing, and something she knows she can do, something she knows she won’t fuck up, something she’s done so many times that it’s about the same regularity as a ticking bomb. The system might be fucked up, the system might not ever do enough, but this, at least, she can fight with her brain and not her fists.

Karen knocks on the door at about noon, poking her head in. Monday isn’t a walk-in day—those are Tuesdays and Fridays—but Darcy’s still half-expecting her to say something about a new client who can only pay in bus tickets when she clears her throat. “You mind if I come in?”

“You don’t have to ask to come in, Kare.” She yanks one earbud out, and leaves the other one playing. “What’s up?”

Karen bites her thumbnail again, and shuts the door behind her. Well, mostly shuts it. They’re technically still open, and Karen’s always the first line of defense if someone comes in unexpectedly. “I just—um.” She hooks her hair behind her ears. The Punisher files are nearly spilling out of control from under her arm, pressed close into her ribs. “I wanted to see if you were, you know. Doing okay.”

She’s two days into fury and she nearly killed someone Saturday night, she’s bruised and cut up all over, she still hasn’t talked to Matt, and Frank Castle is out there more than ready to continue raining hell down on the Kitchen Irish, with no way for her to stop him yet. “Okay is pushing it.”

“Figured,” says Karen. She drags one of the chairs they use for clients over, and plops down into it, still chewing away at her thumbnail. She’s going to make it bleed soon, Darcy thinks. It’s an incredibly bad habit. “Your nose looks better.”

She pulls out her other earbud, and leans back in her chair. The heat’s finally dying off, two days into on-and-off awful fucking rainstorms, and she can at least cross her legs under her desk without turning her whole chair into a sticky mess. “It’s healed enough to put cover-up on, which I appreciate.”

Karen drops her hand away from her mouth, folds her fingers together in her lap. “Are you—I mean. Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Karen.”

“Just, the thing with Matt—I don’t want to overstep or anything, but even—even back when everything started I don’t think I’ve ever seen you guys fight like that. And that, on top of, you know, Castle, and everything that happened with Jen, and all the other shit that’s going on with the firm, just—I wanted to see if you were all right.”

“You don’t have to worry about me, Karen. I’ve dealt with worse.”

“Believe it or not, that’s not all that reassuring.” Karen bites her lip. “If it helps, Matt’s—well, I don’t know how he’s doing, exactly, he won’t talk to me about it and I get the feeling he’s barely said a word to Foggy even if Foggy’s been keeping him penned up in his apartment for the past few days, but he definitely doesn’t look happy. I don’t know if that would make things easier or not.”

It doesn’t, not really. She’s absolutely furious with him, but it’s not like she wants Matt to suffer. She shifts her glasses on her nose. “What have you found out from the files?”

Karen purses her lips. “That was a really bad subject change.”

“But you’re gonna tell me, aren’t you?”

“You suck.” She rolls her eyes. “I mean, a lot of it was stuff I expected. The Dogs of Hell, the Brannigans, the O’Shaughnessys, like Ben said. The cartels. Not just Los Milagros but a couple of others, Serpiente Boys, Muerto Nine, a few more, but—but really heavy on Los Milagros, they’ve been taking a lot of fire. The theory the cops had going in was that this was more gang-on-gang stuff, that the Irish had managed to get their hands on military hardware somehow, and then the warehouse took a hit and they realized it couldn’t be.”

The warehouse, and fifteen bodies pulled out of the wreckage. She wonders if maybe she ought to go down and take a look at it, circle around. There won’t be a lot to find, a few weeks out, but she can at least try. Or she could try and get in touch with someone who might have been there, but that’s a bit of a stretch. “What do they have on Frank Castle himself?”

“Not a lot. I did—hold on.” She bounces up out of her chair, and hits the lights, turning the blinds down on the window. Karen flicks through the files, and turns on Darcy’s desk lamp. “This,” she says, and holds up an X-ray. “It was mixed in with the rest, I don’t know why, there wasn’t any record in these files of Frank Castle ever being hospitalized or any of it, but these are clearly from a medical file, and this—” she points at the X-ray “—this is something.”

It’s a hole. Not just a dent, but an actual, legit hole in the bone of the skull. A bullet hole, she’s pretty sure. Darcy doesn’t know enough about bones or about anatomy to say which one, or to say which part of the brain the bullet must have entered, or to know exactly what might have happened to someone if they’d had a bullet shred into them, into all their synapses and nerves, but just—Jesus. “I think he’s a Marine,” she says, and takes the X-ray from Karen, holding it closer to the light. “The knife I stole from him, that’s Marine issue, Melvin told me. And what he knows about weapons and tactics—I don’t know. Soldier. You think this could have been something that happened overseas?”    

“I don’t think so.” Karen taps her nail to the inked numbers at the base of the X-ray. _Metro-General Hospital._ “He was hospitalized when he was here, on US soil. Whatever happened, it happened to him here, not—not in Iraq or Afghanistan or wherever it was he was deployed, if you’re right and he _was_ a Marine.” She looks pleased, though. “If he really was a Marine I can probably track down his service records somehow, that might give us more background or context.”

“You think he’s having some kind of PTSD meltdown?” She thinks of the Castle she’d seen on the rooftop, terrifyingly in control, the things he’d said. _Think it’s something in you._ She’s not sure she can actually agree with that idea. If this _is_ PTSD, or a breakdown inspired by something he saw in war, then…what? What does that say about her?

_Focus, Darcy._

“I don’t know if that’s—exactly what I’m thinking, no, but I just—there’s something here, don’t you think? There has to be a reason this was mixed in to all of the police records, all—all the photos of dead bodies. They think this—” Karen taps at the X-ray with a tattered fingernail “—was important enough to include. No context for it, just this. I don’t know. I think it could be important. I think—I think the DA might be hiding something.”

“You run it by Ben yet?”

“No, I want to see if I can track down part of it on my own first. I can at least find out if he ever stayed at Metro-General, and where he stayed if he did.”

“Claire’s already on thin ice with her bosses right now, I wouldn’t ask her.”

“No, I wouldn’t. I’ll figure something out.”

Karen takes the X-ray back, and taps at the bullet hole with her tattered fingernail. With her hair hanging the way it is, she looks, Darcy thinks, like she’s a historian digging into an old box of Nazi war records. It’s a very odd, striking image, and she can’t shake it.

Karen hasn’t called her out to walk on the waterfront in two months, she remembers, suddenly. She has a theory, half-crafted and really not something she wants to ask about, that Karen only asks Darcy to come out with her when she has bad nightmares about James Wesley. She’s not sure if that means Karen isn’t having nightmares anymore, or if she’s finally decided to not ask Darcy for help with them.

“What do you think of him?” she says. “Castle.”

Karen puts the X-ray down, and hits the light switch again. “What do you mean?”

“You want to know how he works, right? You’ve been crawling all through these files, you’ve seen what he’s capable of. You’ve probably read more about the psych profile they’ve been putting together for him than any of us. What do you think?”

She opens up the blinds again. Karen’s careful to keep her back turned, looking out the window at the city, at the dumpster on the corner and the scaffolding that still hasn’t been fully replaced on the buildings down the way. _Thanks, Loki, really, we appreciate your redecorating skills._ She clears her throat. “I mean, I don’t think it matters what I think of him, in the long-run. I just—I’m pretty sure there has to be more to the story than this. He’s so—he’s focused, on this, he’s brutal, he doesn’t just go after everyone he sees. He has specific targets.”

Darcy tips her head. Her earring tickles at her shoulder. “The Kitchen Irish, yeah. Los Milagros. The Dogs of Hell. What’s your point?”

“I mean, doesn’t it seem weird to you?” Karen turns. Her eyes are very blue, today. They’re always blue, but there are some days where they’re like…scary blue. Omen of death blue. Darcy’s not sure if it’s the rings under her eyes or the fact that she has something to chase, some mystery to solve. Karen has a tendency, she thinks, to fix on mysteries. She hates them, can’t stand them, wants to unweave them as quickly as possible. She’s like the rest of them: she can’t stand not knowing how things happen. “If—if waging a war against gang violence was his original intention, why would he just focus on those specific groups? What does it matter? There are hundreds of gangs in New York, thousands of them. He could go into any bar in the city and probably pick up one or two ‘bangers to shoot in a back alley, if he wanted. So—so why these groups? What is it about these three subsets of a literally roaring part of the underworld that keeps his attention?”

Darcy tugs a strand of hair in front of her eyes, and starts to braid. “It could be he’s a Hell’s Kitchen boy,” she says. “Out of all the gangs in the city, Kitchen Irish and Dogs of Hell especially are really big here. They have the most power. Clear out his old haunts before moving on to bigger fish.”

“Maybe,” says Karen, in the _I can see your point, but I also think you’re talking out of your ass_ voice. “Or maybe there’s something else here, something bigger. Something Reyes doesn’t want anybody to look at. It’d explain why Ben is getting random phone calls telling him to look into the District Attorney’s office, see if they’ve fucked anything up.”

“Reyes’s DA’s office is actually a shitshow.” She doesn’t realize she’s drumming her pen against the keyboard until she looks at her draft of the formal complaint and realizes she’s added about fifty extra Ts to the word _Complaint_ at the headline. Darcy backspaces. “I haven’t been working long enough to remember the last DA, but Jen was in law school, she was a 2L the year Reyes took over. Year before I came up to New York, I think? And ever since then things have been just…falling apart. She runs a tight ship, but inside it’s a disaster zone.”

“So you’re saying it’s probable?”

“I’m saying it’s not out of the realm of possibility.” She undoes the braid again with a few sharp tugs. “If Reyes catches you doing this, she’d come down on the firm, you know that.”

“Yeah, she could.” Karen sneaks a look at her. “Not going to tell me to be careful this time?”

Darcy shuts her eyes. “I really—I get that you guys are making your own choices, just…sometimes, I don’t know. I don’t want anyone to get hurt.”

“Except you,” Karen says. “You don’t want anyone getting hurt, but you don’t care if _you_ get hurt.”

“That’s kind of sick and twisted, isn’t it?”

“A little, yeah.” Karen looks at her thumbnail. “Shit. Band-aid?”

“Matt’s top-left drawer. He won’t care.”

Karen shifts around the pile of files on the floor, and jimmies the drawer open. The top-left one always sticks, for reasons none of them can quite work out. They need to oil it, but it keeps getting shoved aside. “I get that you worry, Darcy—Christ, after what’s happened the past few days, I get why you _would_ be worried, we came really fucking close to something I don’t even want to imagine, but—I don’t know. It’s kind of hard to take it seriously when you and Matt say shit like _it’s dangerous_ or _be careful_ when you refuse to listen to us saying the same things to you. And with Matt, you know, I get it, because he’s like—he thinks everything that happens to everyone he knows is somehow his fault, and I don’t know where he gets that, really, but it’s a pain in the ass and it’s something we live with, but you don’t have the same chip on your shoulder. Or at least, I didn’t think you did, until the past few months.”

She swallows that down, slowly. It tastes, she thinks, like the meds she’d had to take as a kid for pneumonia—sickly and completely nauseating. “We’ve been kind of shit to you guys, haven’t we?” Darcy says, and her voice is _not_ fucking trembling, goddamn it, she can ask that one fucking question without getting all shaky and weird. Karen folds the corner of the folder back, creasing it with her one remaining nail.

“I mean, you want a nice answer or you want an honest answer?”

“Like that’s not terrifying to hear.” Darcy takes a deep breath. “Go with honest. I don’t—I don’t really want nice right now.  Nice feels too much like a lie.”

Karen stops at that, watching her, her eyes flinty. Then she sighs. “I mean, I don’t think you’ve been shit. Cocky, sure. I mean, we’ve all been kind of cocky. It could have been way worse. But the fact that we know, that—that you didn’t keep this from us, or lie about it afterwards, that you—” and she thinks Karen might mean her, in particular, not Darcy-and-Matt but just Darcy “—ask for help when you need it and at least, you know, _try_ not to be a jerk about it most of the time is good.” She takes a breath. “It’s hard on Foggy—you know why it’s hard on Foggy, what you and Matt do isn’t something he gets, not really, not even a year later.”

“What about you?”

“I have my own thing that I’m doing.” Karen taps at the folder again. “I just think it’s—it’s really fucking hypocritical of both of you to get angry and fussy and try to keep the pair of us locked up in a closet when there are things we can do to help you. Looking into the Punisher, going along with Reyes’s plan, those are things that I can do to help. And what Foggy did, with the Dogs of Hell, yeah, that was fucking stupid to go in alone, believe me, I’m not—I’m not excusing how stupid that was, but it was a way _he_ could help. And telling us we shouldn’t want to reach out and do something when we’re already watching the pair of you go and get your asses kicked is more than a little rich.”

It doesn’t sting as much as she expects it will. Darcy looks down at her bandaged hand, flexes her fingers, slowly. Tendons and skin tug at the scabs, pinching her knuckles uncomfortably. “It’s not that I don’t think you can handle it.”

“I know it isn’t,” says Karen. “But the pair of you have to get it through your heads. I don’t know where it comes from—I really would like to think it’s not that you don’t trust us enough to be able to handle ourselves alone, because seriously, that’s…actually a really shit thing to think and I don’t want to go near that ever again, but you have to understand. I get that this is something that you two do, that you walk out, with Kate, and you do these things and you see these things that Foggy and me don’t. But that doesn’t mean that we’re not just as much a part of this as you are. And you’re not as bad, Darcy, you’re really not.”

“Matt?”

“Matt.” She sighs. “I don’t even want to start in on that one. Just—the past couple days, that’s the worst you’ve been in a long time. What you need to do is remember that we’re making our own choices. That we’ve _made_ our choices, the whole way through. What happened with Fisk, you and Matt didn’t do that alone. We all did it, we all put ourselves in danger and fought him and we all came through it, and that’s something that we wouldn’t have been able to do if we were all separate parts. We did it together, and we’re still a team, or—or I want us to all still be a team, anyway. And if we’re a team, then you and Matt don’t get to look at the choices Foggy and I have made and dismiss them. You don’t get to arbitrarily cut us out when you don’t feel comfortable with the situation anymore. That’s not how a team works. We’re not children. We’re adults, we make our own decisions, and we’ve chosen to stay, because we love you, and because we want to help you, both of you. So you need to stop shutting us down.”

Her eyes, somehow, are dry. Darcy tangles her hands together, and meets Karen’s gaze, steely and blue and nervous and all hurricane, this woman, Karen who’d killed James Wesley to protect them months and months ago, and just…Christ. It’s the same choice she’d made, when she’d first started working with the Devil. It’s the same choice she makes every night. When Karen puts her files down and comes around the back of the desk, Darcy reaches out, and hides her face in Karen’s shirt, digging her nails into the fabric.

“I do trust you,” she says, very quietly. “I trust you and Foggy, and Kate, I just—I really don’t want any of you to get hurt, that’s all.”

“I know,” Karen says, just as quietly. “But both you and Matt need to realize that you can’t control everything. The world doesn’t work like that. You’re—you both have this thing, that you do, where you seem to have this like…set image of what things are supposed to be like, and when things don’t match up, you get freaked out. And when you freak out, you get snappy, and it’s not really all that nice for the rest of us to manage.”

“So you’re saying I’m like a momfriend on steroids,” Darcy says. Karen huffs, petting at Darcy’s hair.

“I mean, yeah. And it’s fine for you to want to take care of us, Darcy, it’s how you show people what you feel about them, but just—keep in mind we’re not fragile baby birds. That’s all.”

It takes her a minute. Darcy nods, very slowly, breathing in and out as deep and as measured as she can manage to try and keep herself steady. Karen stands still, smoothing at Darcy’s hair with one absent hand. Sweat trickles down the back of her neck.

“I don’t blame you,” Darcy says, muffled into Karen’s shirt. “For what Fisk did. I don’t blame you, Karen. I never did.”

Karen flinches. She flinches, and the next pass of her hand down Darcy’s hair is shaky, and she’s breathing like she’s on the verge of tears. Darcy squeezes tighter, shutting her eyes and holding on, until finally she stops. When Karen pulls back, Darcy has to fumble Ben’s bloodstained hanky out of her purse, and blow her nose.

“I’m gonna, um.” Karen points at the door. “I’m gonna go and see if I can find any record of Frank Castle being enlisted. And let you work.”

“Yeah.” Darcy blows her nose again. “Okay.”

Karen’s on the threshold and shutting the door when it comes back to her, the thought. “Hey, um. Karen?”

Karen pauses with the doorknob in her hand, turning back. Her eyes, Darcy thinks, look a little red. “Yeah?”

“In your crawl through the files, did you—did you see anything about a woman?” “

“A woman?”

“Yeah, um—” She tries to remember. “Dark, darkish skin. Maybe—I don’t know, Asian or Latinax maybe. Something in between. Around my height, but I can’t remember what kind of shoes she was wearing, she could be shorter or taller. And—and good at fighting. You see anything about anyone like that?”

“The only women mentioned in these files are either the widows of the victims or one or two of the people working for the ME’s office.” Karen starts gnawing at her thumbnail again, and then jumps when she bites the band-aid instead. “You didn’t mention anything about a woman before.”

“I was kind of stressed.”

“No, of course.” She looks down at the files in her arms. “I didn’t see anything my first few go-throughs, not that I can remember, but—but I’ll keep looking. And if I come up with anything when it comes to the hospital angle, I’ll let you know, all right?”

“Yeah.” _Be safe,_ she nearly says. Darcy bites her tongue. “Tell me when you have something.”

Karen watches her for a moment, inscrutable. She says, “You’re gonna be okay, y’know.”

She’s gone before Darcy can say anything. Still, there’s a faint smile on her lips when she wanders out of Darcy and Matt’s shared office to settle in at her own desk again. Darcy looks at her keyboard, at her screen, at the complaint, and blows air out her nose. She’s not really sure she wants to be here when Matt and Foggy get back, and she needs to file this before the end of the day today, anyway.

.

.

.

She really should have expected it, after Karen. They’ve gone into damage control mode, the pair of them, and if she’s heard from Karen, then she could set her watch by how long it’ll take Foggy to get in touch. She’s just leaving the courthouse when her phone goes off, a six word text that brooks no argument. _At Mira’s, come and get food._ Which, she’s not gonna turn down food from Mira’s. It’s a diner that Kate introduced them to, and it has the best goddamn sourdough ever, so it’s…yeah. She needs to eat, and it’s not like she’s avoiding Foggy, even if he’s probably gonna ask her questions she doesn’t want to answer. Darcy checks her phone, and then makes for the subway.

Foggy’s in their regular table at the back, already more than half through his sandwich and flicking through PDFs on his phone of claim drafts. When the bell over the door clinks, though, he’s up out of his seat and bouncing on his toes. “Hey,” he says, when she gets close enough, and then buries her in a hug that smells like pickles. She’s still kind of uncomfortably warm from walking the block and a half it took to get to this place, but she hides her face in his shoulder and holds on for as long as she can reasonably get away with it. Foggy’s family. It doesn’t fix anything, not really, but she feels less like breaking things if Foggy’s around. Foggy leans back, and runs his hands up and down her arms, awkwardly. “How you holding up?”

“Like the only cat at a conference for thermometer-happy veterinarians.” She peels off her suit jacket, and hangs it on the back of the chair. “What about you?”

“I told both of you I wouldn’t get involved in your bullshit,” Foggy says. “And yet somehow I am involved in the bullshit. Though, to be fair, the bullshit is more Matt being a jackass to all of us then, you know, whatever boyfriend-girlfriend fights you guys have sometimes.”

She winces. “I’m sorry, Foggy, I didn’t—”

“Hey, you don’t need to apologize. Not that you’ve been flawless lately, but I’m like…ninety-eight percent sure this one is almost entirely on Matt.” He presses at her shoulder, tilts her into the chair. “You haven’t eaten today, have you?”

“I mean, I had coffee at the office—wait, how—”

“Darcy, I’ve known you for eight years, I know when you haven’t eaten. You get the pinched zombie look.” He waves at the waitress. Once Darcy’s ordered something, and the woman’s wandered off again, Foggy folds his hands on the table. “How’s Kate’s?”

“There is a special kind of instinctive terror of being the only person in a Park Avenue building who isn’t either a gazillionaire or working for a gazillionaire. I feel like people are trying to shrivel me up with their eyes when I barely even poke my nose in the door.” There’s also the fact that she’s kind of forgotten how to sleep alone, but that’s not something she really wants to talk to Foggy about. She barely wants to think about it herself, even when she’s stuck staring at the window with her arms around an extra pillow, trying to not pay attention to how the detergent is making her nose itch. “How’s yours?”

“You can ask about him, y’know,” Foggy says. “He asks about you.”

“Really?”

“Well, not in so many words, but he always starts paying attention when the phone rings. He stops when he realizes it isn’t you, but, I mean. He’s doing the meerkat head-twitch thing, so.”

That shouldn’t sting the way it is. “I wasn’t wrong to shout at him.”

“Hell no, you weren’t,” says Foggy, and something unravels under her collarbone. _Thank God._ She hadn’t been worried about that, exactly, that Foggy might disagree with her shouting, but just. She doesn’t want to fight both her boys at once. “Maybe you could’ve picked a better moment, but, I mean. I’ve shouted at him. Karen’s shouted at him. There’s been a lot of shouting. Which probably isn’t helping his head any, but he brought it on himself this time.”

She taps the fork against the table.

“He hasn’t told me much about any of it, but like—I know something happened. And it was probably something really bad, judging by how he’s acting. He keeps going to Fogwell’s just to beat the shit out of things, which we came to a compromise about. And so far as I know, he hasn’t gone out to hit actual people. It’s basically the only thing I could get him to agree to.”

He would, she thinks, considering the last time he’d been out he’d tried to shoot Frank Castle in the head. ( _Me or her,_ Castle had said. _Me or her, shoot_ , and Matt had pulled the trigger, and he’d _meant it_ , he’d aimed and the only reason Castle isn’t dead right now is because of luck, and that’s…yeah. She can imagine how Matt is behaving, right now, after that.) Darcy looks out the window, watching pedestrians in short-shorts and tank-tops, in flip-flops and T-shirts, the businesspeople in suits and the families with their strollers and balloons from whatever weird Central Park event is going on today. “It was bad, the other night. I don’t know if you want to hear any of it, but—yeah. It was pretty bad.”

Foggy rubs at his nose. “As bad as what happened when—I mean.”

He points at her hand. She hadn’t bothered to put cover-up on her scar today, hadn’t thought about it. She draws it off the table, and starts pushing her thumb into the mark, dragging back and forth, following the uneven skin. “Different-bad. But—yeah. Still—still basically that bad.”

Foggy blows air through his nose. “No wonder he won’t talk about it.”

Darcy shrugs, and digs her nail into the scar. The waitress shows up with her sandwich and fries, refills the coffee mugs, and vanishes again.

“If it helps,” Foggy says, “I think he knows he’s fucked up. Like—he’s angry and he’s taking it out on everyone but he’s angriest at himself. At least, I think that’s what it is. It’s like our 1L year all over again and sometimes I’m not entirely sure if he’s being a jackass just to be a jackass or if he’s being a jackass in some weird Catholic self-flagellation _drive everyone else away because I can’t stand myself right now_ thing. Hey, he could go for broke and do both at once.”

“If he does,” Darcy says, “I’m going to crush him with a steamroller.”

He gives her a turtlish, under-the-eyebrows look. “I think you’ve been spending too much time thinking about how you’re going to beat the shit out of him, if that’s the first option.”

“That’s like the fifth, there are four stages of suffering before that.”

“I am occasionally incredibly concerned for your sanity.”

“Only occasionally?” She breaks a french fry. “I’m losing my touch.”

“Har-de-har.” Foggy swipes the crust of his sandwich through a drop of mustard on his plate, and pops it into his mouth. Still chewing, he says, “I dunno. He’s doing that stupid bullheaded thing where he’s convinced himself that he’s in the right even though he knows for a fact that he isn’t and it’s just—” He twirls his finger in the air. “He’s put the wall back up, y’know? The Great Wall of Matthew.”

“I mean, I can put his head through the Great Wall if you want.”

“That would probably kill him. But, it’s tempting.” He leans back in his chair. “I’ve tried talking to him about it, but he won’t listen to me. He won’t listen to Karen, either, or to Kate—”

“Kate too?”

“Didn’t she tell you? She showed up at about noon yesterday and tore into him for a full half an hour, it was insane. I think she gets practice with Hawkguy maybe, but it was, uh. It was scary like whoa.”

Holy shit, Kate. She’d said she had something to do, but Darcy had assumed it was like…school stuff, or homework stuff. Class stuff. Hawkeye stuff. Not stuff like _lecture Matt Murdock for a full half an hour and come out of it pissed_ type stuff. “If he didn’t listen to Kate, what makes you think he’ll listen to me? Kate’s just as much of a mask as either of us.”

“Yeah,” says Foggy, “but the thing is, Kate and Matt are like…siblings. He’s not going to listen to a little sister the way he’d listen to you. I mean, Jesus, Darcy, he’s been in love with you since freshman year.”

“Doesn’t mean he’ll listen.”

“He does though, Darcy, seriously. I don’t think you realize how much he listens to you. Like—you have some kind of speech-based superpower where you can phrase things that drill through that stupidly thick skull of his and get him to hear them. Which is weird, and occasionally freaky, but people have known for years that we want to get Matt to do something or back down from something or understand something that he’s being idiotic about, we send you in. That’s how it always works.”

Darcy frowns. “That makes it sound like I’m defusing a bomb.”

“He _listens_ to you,” Foggy says again. “The way he doesn’t to anybody else, that I can tell. You don’t take any of his shit and you don’t back down and even when you get frustrated you still just like—nag and nag and nag—”

“Watch your words, there, cowboy.”

“Fine, not nag. You talk at him until he starts actually paying attention. And most of the time he _wants_ to listen to you anyway, so it works out. Usually.”

The ache under her breastbone has started back up, a finger pressed hard into a bruise. “He listens to you, too, Foggy.”

“Not about this, he doesn’t.” He shrugs. “He’ll listen to me about a lot of things, but this stuff, the—the mask stuff, the fighting stuff, the Batman stuff—I can’t convince him about any of that. If he’s going to listen to anyone about all the bullshit he’s pulled the past few days, it’s you.”

She knots her arms across her chest. “I dunno. He might—there are a lot of things that he might not hear me on. And I’m…not really in the mood to get him to listen, anyway. Mostly I just want to punch him in the face. Or cry. In either order.”

“Valid.” Foggy steals a french fry off her plate, and ignores the look she gives him. “Translating for him isn’t your job and it’s not fair to make you do it. I’m just saying, you know, that you could probably get him to walk backwards off a cliff if you tried hard enough.”

Now that’s an image. “I mean, maybe.”

“Not maybe.” He snags another fry when she draws back, and plonks it in the ketchup. “If you ask me, which, let’s pretend that you did, I don’t think you have to try and convince him of anything. He lets you in his head in a way that he doesn’t with the rest of us, and that’s half the fight right there. But even if you don’t try to knock some sense into him, or you don’t want to or whatever, you still can’t avoid him forever. And he can’t avoid you, especially considering that there’s still some psycho with a shotgun wandering around and trying to kill people. Not that I like the idea of either of you going up against the bastard again, because yeah, it—I mean, I kind of want to wet my pants when I think about him, no lie, but the pair of you are doing the do and being insane and it’s better that you go up against him together than one on one and get your asses kicked, _again._ ” He stops. “I had a point. The point was, you need to talk to him, Darcy, and soon. And if he listens to you then he listens to you and if he doesn’t then he’s an idiot, but at least after that we know we need to like…quadruple-team up against his stupid.”

“The joys of knowing Matt Murdock,” Darcy says, and Foggy snorts. He’s stolen another fry and gone to watching the new waitress out of the corner of his vision (she’s cute, Darcy thinks, especially in the way Foggy thinks people are cute, which is generally blonde and super-leggy) when she clears her throat. “I’m sorry I’ve been such a jackass.”

Foggy blinks at her a few times. He waves his hand. “I mean, considering you barely sleep, it would surprise me if you weren’t being a jackass.”

“Just—” She fists her hands up under the table. “I don’t know. I was a jackass in the hospital and I’ve probably been a jackass for weeks now, and I’ve been awful to you and Karen, and that isn’t fair, and I kind of want to kick myself repeatedly in the ass for it but I can’t do that, obviously, so it’s just kind of. I don’t know. I was a jackass and I’m sorry, Foggy, I didn’t—”  

“Hey, chill.” He blows hair out of his eyes. “If you keep apologizing then you’re not gonna stop and it’ll get awkward and we can just like. Cut you off there, okay? Because yeah, you were a jackass, but now you’re trying not to be. Or at least, I hope you’re trying not to be. And I’ve made stupid decisions in the past year, too, so.”

Darcy nudges her foot into his shin, and pulls back.

“Are you going out again tonight?” He leans back in his chair. “To look for Castle?”

“I don’t know. I fucked his knee up pretty badly, I’m not sure he can walk on it very well. He might be quiet for another night, he might not.”

“You gonna take Matt?”

She shrugs. “Hadn’t thought about it.”

“He’s getting twitchy, is all. And I could do with one night in my own apartment that isn’t drenched in existential angst.” Foggy sighs. “I love him like a brother, despite that weird three-month period in freshman year we’re _not talking about ever again,_ Darcy—”

“Foggy, you’re talking to me.”

“Do I want to remember that I had a thing for my roommate for the whole of fall semester of freshman year? No. Especially considering the current circumstances.” He wrinkles his nose at her, like Bambi with a butterfly. “It’s awkward and unacceptable and it’s also really, incredibly embarrassing, because of the whole _he probably knew the whole time and pretended not to_ part. But yeah. I love him like a brother, the pair of you are my best friends, and if he stays one more night on my couch he’s probably going to claw _Victoria Regina_ into the walls with his fingernails and then break something to pretend he’s fighting some gangster in a back alley. Even with a head injury, I don’t know how much longer I can actually keep him pinned up inside without killing him myself.”

Darcy bites her lip. “Has he said anything about hearing problems?”

“No. Should he have?”

“Just—I dunno. He hit his head pretty hard, and things happen.” When Foggy goes for another french fry, she smacks his hand. “If you want french fries so badly go buy some, you loser.”

“They always burn mine here. They like you better than me.”

“Your life is so hard.” She adds more cream to her coffee, stirring. It’s a shade too pale, now, but there’s not much she can do about it. “I don’t know. We need to deal with Castle. After—who knows. It’s not like I can slow down, no matter how little good it does.”

At the counter, the blonde leggy waitress answers the phone. There’s a wedding ring on her hand. _Ah, shame._ Another strike. Karen’s probably out doing her investigative thing, at the moment, and when Darcy checks her phone there’s a text from Kate ( _what’s the deal, wheel?_ ). She throws it back into her purse. There’s a family of four at the other end of the counter, two women, a little boy, and a baby maybe six months old with a puffy baby afro and very chubby arms. It’s a whole different kind of existential terror, really. _Real talk: babies are frightening, and I don’t want to be near one._ Still, the moms look happy, anyway, judging by the smiles on their faces.

“That’s a difference from _if we stop, people get hurt,_ at least.” Foggy blows at his hair again. “Is that why you were so freaked out in the hospital?”

“Not all of it, but I mean, what have we really changed, Foggy?” She shrugs. “We can’t exactly say we bought Frank Castle a gun and put it in his hand, but what difference have we really made, doing this? Who’s to say we haven’t made things worse by doing what we’ve been doing, the same way Castle has?”

“I mean, I think there are a lot of people who are kind of grateful that you’re not shooting up barfronts and blowing up warehouses, just saying.”

“I know.” She knows that, for certain. “Just—sometimes it feels like I’m carrying a bucket with holes in it, and water spilling everywhere, and every time I tape it up in one place, three more cracks open up. Frank Castle was right about one thing, even if his methods are—well. The problem at the root is society, and that’s not something that you can change by going around with a heavy stick.”

Foggy shifts the ice around in his empty glass. “I mean, you know how I feel about what you guys do. I think it’s crazy, and I spend—” He swallows. “You know, every night I’ll wake up at least twice thinking the phone’s gone off, that one of you is dead. I can’t sleep through sirens anymore. I wish you weren’t doing it, either of you. I think this is what army wives feel, I don’t know, but it’s awful, and I’d like to not have to feel it anymore.”

“Foggy—”

“Don’t make a big deal out of it, seriously, I can manage.” He makes a face at her. “I do wish you would stop. But I know that’s impossible, just because you’re you, and Matt’s Matt, and as much as I hate to admit it and as hard as it is to see it right now, you do make a difference. It’s not rampant change, Darcy, not like you want, but—but I mean, Karen’s alive because Matt put on the mask. Remember? You told me that. Took me a while to think of it that way, but it’s true. Karen’s alive, and you’re alive. Elena’s alive, even with what Fisk tried to pull. Claire’s alive. A lot of people would be dead right now if not for you two.”

That’s true, but— “I don’t know, Foggy.”

“You’ve seen the graffiti around the Kitchen, right? Devils and fallen angels? The creepy snake lady?"

"Lamia."

"Whatever. What you guys do, that affects people. It scares the bad guys and makes the good ones feel safer, and yeah, sometimes you’re gonna fuck up, but if you didn’t do it, then…I don’t know. Things might be a hell of a lot worse.” He scowls. “Much as I hate to think that you’ll take that as encouragement to do stupid shit without feeling bad, but you do do some good, Darcy. Even if you don’t think you do, there are people alive who would be dead if not for you and for Matt. If you can think of it that way, maybe, it’ll be easier.”

Darcy presses her foot into his calf again. This time, she leaves it there, because she can’t actually work up the courage to speak. When Foggy’s fingers twitch on the tabletop, she shoves her plate into the middle. “Eat them.”

“They’re your fries.”

“And you’re eyeing them like they’re one of your French girls, Foggy, eat the damn fries. Though you can at least buy me another coffee, if you’re gonna be a cheap date.”

“Fine. But this is the last time.”

“You said that last time.”

Foggy kicks her under the table.   

.

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.

 **Lilith (@theangelofmercy):** Kind of a weird question, but directed at everyone: what have vigilantes ever done for you?

 **Hawkeye, Not Hawkgal (@hisforhawtass):** @theangelofmercy Someone’s philosophical this afternoon

 **unicornrider (@dkwlkxia):** @theangelofmercy Broke my brother’s hand

 **MojojoDojo (@idonotthinkthatmeans)** : @theangelofmercy You walked me home when one of my coworkers trapped me in a parking lot

 **ChocoBanana (@niseijuu):** @theangelofmercy Spider-Man high-fived me once

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.

.

There’s an odd sense of inevitability when she walks into Fogwell’s to find Matt at one of the bags.

She won’t lie. She kind of came here looking for him. Foggy was right. _You can't avoid him forever,_ and her heart's beating way too fast at the thought of this, the fight that they're absolutely guaranteed to have (because she came here looking for it, as well as him, no lie) but Foggy's right, and they have to do this. They can't just let it lie. It had still taken her the entirety of the afternoon to work up the courage to get her bag together and go after him, but now she’s done it, and…yeah. Here he is, and here _she_ is, and it's game on, cage match of the decade. 

He looks like shit, she thinks, uncharitably. Like he’s been kicking the living hell out of himself, and like he’s pissed and has no outlet. Exactly what Foggy had described. _Good._ Sounds like what she’s been feeling. She locks the door behind her—it’s after hours, but Matt must have come in through the skylight, because the key had still been under the brick where Bernie leaves it—and shifts her bag on her shoulder. “Hey.”

“Done avoiding me?” Matt says, and hits the bag hard enough that the chain rattles. Darcy bites her tongue hard, closes her eyes.

“Like I’ve been the only one doing that.”

He stills the bag with both hands, breathing hard. There’s sweat soaking the back of his shirt. He’s either been here for a while, or he’s been doing stupid shit with a head injury again, and either way, he’s a mess of a human being. Matt rocks back and forth with the sway of the bag, eyes closed, panting. When Darcy throws her shit onto the nearest bench, and drops down to wrap her hands, he says, “You brought your things back to the apartment.”

“I did.” She’s going to have to wear gloves, or at least not punch things with her right hand, not until the scabs get a few more days to settle. Working with Trish yesterday had been more flips and throws than actually landing punches, but bag-work is out for a while. At least with her hands. “Did you think I wasn’t going to?”

For a minute, the only thing she can hear is him breathing, and the creak of the bag. Then he wets his lips. “I wasn’t sure.”

God, she could strangle him. Her fingers are itching for it. “We’re fighting,” she says, shortly. “I’m pissed at you. Doesn’t mean I’m going anywhere.”

He hasn’t been sleeping, she doesn’t think. There are rings under his eyes. If not for the fact that Foggy’s sworn up and down to her via text that Matt hasn’t actually gone out hunting for the past thirty-six hours, she’d wonder if he’d been looking for Castle. “Oh,” he says, and hits the bag again. Darcy stares hard at her hands.

“Yeah, _oh_. Did you think I was going to ditch because you fucked up?”

“I don’t know.” He says it through his teeth, hitting the bag, over and over. “Didn’t seem out of the realm of possibility.”

“Yeah, well, fuck you.” She tucks the end of the bandage into the layering. “Jesus, I forgot how much of a jackass you can be when you’re in this mood.”

There’s a look on his face that reminds her of typhoons, listening to Hurricane Sandy whipping at the windows and trying to pretend the world might not come in on their heads. _Come on, Matt. Come at me._ “What _mood_?”

“The _I don’t want to admit I fucked up and try to make everyone else feel like they did instead_ mood, the one that nearly wrecked you the first year of law school.” Darcy flexes her hands. “And you know what, back then I was understanding, because you’d been through a really bad breakup, but this time it’s not sitting so well with me.”

“Is that how you’re playing this?”

“Yeah, because you just told me that you thought I was going to fucking leave you because we’re having a fight. Because if that’s what you think of me, then seriously, fuck you, Matt.” 

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Wasn’t it?” She shakes her head. “You think I’m overreacting to all of this, aren’t you? Still. Less than a week after you, you know, nearly died, you think I’m overreacting when I ask you to keep a single fucking promise to me, and you can’t manage it.”

“You’re telling me you wouldn’t have done the same thing?” He’s going at the bag like he wants to break it, like he wants to snap bone, and it’s infuriating and agonizing to watch. “If you’d been the one closest to the water tower, you wouldn’t have done the exact same thing?”

She swears under her breath. “I like to think I trust Kate enough to be able to believe her when she says she can make the shot. That’s not the point, Matt. The point is that if I can’t trust you to keep a promise to me, I don’t—I don’t know what I’m supposed to even do with that, what am I supposed to do if I can’t trust you?”

“I was trying to _help_!”

“Were you? Were you trying to help? Or were you just thinking that you couldn’t trust either Kate or me enough to get the job done and you had to run in and do it yourself because _clearly_ we can’t actually manage anything ourselves—”

“That’s not—”

“Bullshit!” She wants to scream. _Breathe, Darcy._ “God, I could _kill_ you sometimes! You’re not the Lone Ranger anymore! You’re not _alone,_ damn you, you haven’t been alone for nearly a year, you have people who love you and want to help you. You don’t get to pull this Lone Gunman Silverado shit and ignore us. Do you not trust me or Kate to be able to manage things?”

“Of course I trust you, Christ—”

“Then _let me deal with my shit_! Yeah, I asked you for help, I asked you to support me, I asked you to be there to make sure I didn't go over the edge, to make sure it wasn't just Kate and me alone; I _didn’t_ ask you to go jumping into the middle of a fight you couldn’t manage because you spent the whole day laid up with a head injury, just—” _How many times do I have to say it_? “You scared the living shit out of me, you bastard, do you know—you should _know_ what it feels like to watch someone you love get taken away from you and not know if you can get them back, and that was after—that was after I asked you, I basically _begged_ you, I asked you to take it easy, I asked you not to go after him on your own, and you did it anyway, and I can’t— _ugh_!” She shoves a bag with both hands. “I nearly lost you twice in two days and the second time was because you—because you thought you knew better, because you _promised_ and you didn’t keep it, and maybe that makes me as hypocritical as I don’t want to be, but Jesus Christ, I don’t think it’s much of an ask for me to expect you to not fucking lie to me!”

She thinks he’s going to say something, thinks he might shout, but he’s completely silent. Then, in a raw, awful voice, he says, “I didn’t lie to you. I didn’t—I _didn’t_ lie to you.”

“Yeah, but you made me a promise and you didn’t keep it. Kind of a thin hair to split.”

Matt twitches, badly. “You wanted Castle dead, Darcy.”

“Yeah, and I asked you to be there to remind me how bad of a fucking idea that was, how bad an idea it _would_ be, not to fucking—not to pull this white knight jump-in-front-of-a-bullet macho bullshit!”

“You told Kate to take the shot!”

“It was a logical play!”

“Yeah, but you weren’t talking about the logical play, Darcy, you were angry and you were out of control and you wanted to kill him and you know it.”

 _Christ. Right to the heart._ She shuts her eyes, breathing hard. She hasn’t even hit one of the bags yet, and she feels like she’s been punching things for hours. “Yeah.” She spits it. “Maybe I did. I’m not saying I didn’t fuck up, that night. I was on the edge, I wanted Castle dead, I could have killed Grotto and no one would have been able to stop me. But I wasn’t the one with the bow. Kate was. And if you think Kate was going to do a damn thing other than shoot one of her net arrows and get him down off the water tower then I’m sorry, but I’m starting to think you _do_ have brain damage—”

“Darcy—”

“What I wanted didn’t have anything to do with what Kate was planning, and it sure as hell doesn’t change the fact that you made me a promise that you would be careful and you jumped at the first goddamn opportunity to throw yourself into the crossfire, _again—_ ”

“That’s not—”

“Isn’t it?”

“No!”

“Then what the hell was it? Because from where I’m standing—”

Matt makes a noise that’s half-snarl, half-shout, and hits the bag so hard that she thinks he might hurt himself. “You don’t understand!”

“Then tell me, damn you! What the hell was going through your head when you _promised me—_ ”

“ _I didn’t want you to lose yourself_!”

She stops, and stares at him. She can’t speak, for a moment. Matt hits the bag, and then he pushes at it, hard, enough to swing the thing back and forth like a metronome. He stalks away from it. “You told me once that if I killed someone, it’d kill me, and you know—you _know_ it’s the same for you, and you were angry, and you were out of control, and you know what this does to people, Darcy, I didn’t want to lose you to that, I _can’t_ lose you—”

“You weren’t even close to losing me to it until you decided to take it all on you and your damn hero complex and _left me alone_!”

Matt jerks. He jumps like she’s just come at him with a knife, like she’s driven a blade into him and cut something out, winces back away from her and shifts up into the ring, ducking through the elastic railing. She watches him for a breath, for two, and when he starts going through a kata, she heaves herself up onto it. “Matt.”

He snaps up, off the mats, spins into a kick that makes her dizzy, and lands again. He doesn’t say a word.

“Don’t pull this silent treatment bullshit, damn you, _look at me_.”

Up again, spinning—

She doesn’t think. Darcy steps into his way, and hits him. Or she tries to hit him—Matt smacks it aside, the blow, baring his teeth like he’s been waiting for it, and then it’s not sparring, not really, it’s an argument without words, snapping back and forth, trying to say things neither of them have the voice for. _I can’t lose you_ , and it’s Darcy sweeping his legs out from under him and Matt flipping sideways out of the way, landing hard and lashing out with his foot, and they're not pulling back the punches the way they normally do, not slowing down. _Don’t ever do this again,_ and when he kicks her in the ribs it lances all the way up through her spine, sends a jitter of pain through the gash from the bullet, but she rolls into it, lets it put her out of reach, and this is something that they’ve both needed, something that she hasn’t been able to scrape away at with sparring with Trish or her fight with Castle or any of it, just _movement_ , and it’s _I can’t lose you_ and _you nearly died_ and _we both nearly fell off the edge and I’m terrified of it ever happening_ and _don’t ever do this again_ and _I’m so angry with you right now I could scream_ all wrapped up into one.

He’s still moving slow, still just the slightest bit unsteady on his feet, not quite quick enough. When he throws one last punch, he telegraphs, and Darcy flips him hard over her hip and twists his arm up behind his back, pressing her knee hard into his spine and torqueing his wrist sideways. “ _Look at me,_ ” she says, panting, and Matt hisses through his teeth and says something that could be a swearword under his breath. He could get out of this, she thinks. He’s snapped himself out of worse holds. He could easily flip and pin her to the floor and win the match. Still, he doesn’t move. “Goddamn it, Matt.”

It takes her a second to remember she’s twisting his wrist. Darcy lets go, shifts off his back. Matt rolls to lift his face to the ceiling, eyes closed. She thinks he might say something, but instead he just blinks, slowly, like he’s waiting for her to speak. She’s exhausted, all at once. She’s so exhausted she could cry.

“You don’t want to lose me.” She fists her hands up. “You don’t want to lose me and I don’t want to lose you, all right, can we just—can we agree to disagree on that one? Please.”

He sits up. She can see more bruising through the arm of his shirt, and it stings. Matt shuts his eyes, and breathes, in through his nose, out through his mouth. He sits, and all of a sudden he looks so damn tired that he might just pass out, right there on the floor.

“There are three things I need from you right now,” she says. “And I need you to listen very carefully, because if you don’t, then I’m going to be staying at Kate’s until you do, and I’ll be perfectly within my rights to do it. Don’t talk, Matt, listen. The first thing is that I need you to remember what you said to Foggy, back when all this started, that this is a democracy, not a tyranny. This team is not under your supervision. You do not get to make the final call. The five of us are equal, we do this together, and if you can’t get that, then we have a serious problem, not just with the two of us, but with everyone. And if I’m not wrong, you’ve been hearing about that from Foggy and Karen, too, the past few days, so it’s not just me, Matt. We work better together, and I know you know that. I need you to climb off your goddamn self-righteous high-horse and remember it.”

“Self-righteous high-horse?”

“You have a better term for it?”

Matt lets out a sharp breath. “What’s the second thing?”

“We’re going after Castle again. Soon. We can’t not. If we don’t, he’s going to kill more people.” Matt grimaces, but doesn’t turn his face away. “I don’t think—I don’t think either of us are up for going after him alone. So we need to work together, on this, because I don’t…I’m still not sure I trust myself. And I don’t know how you’re feeling, but considering everything—I don’t know.” Her eyes need to stop burning, _right_ now, damn it. “So I won’t go after him alone, and you won’t go after him alone, but damn it, Matt, I need to know I can trust you. I need you to prove to me that I can trust you, Matt, I need proof of that, because right now I don’t feel like I can, and that’s—I don’t like the idea that I can’t. I love you, I want to be able to trust you, but right now it’s hard, so I need you to tell me that you’re not going to go after him alone, that you’re not going to run wild, and I need you to _mean it_ , because otherwise—I don’t even know. Otherwise we have much bigger issues than you not being able to keep your head down when you nearly get it blown off.”   

He blinks, furiously. His eyes are wet. “Darcy—”

“I need you to tell me,” she says. “Right now. And I need you to not turn your back on it again, because if you do, then—I don’t know what I’ll do. But I need you to _tell me_.”

“I won’t.” He nearly trips over it. “I’m—if I hear anything, I’ll tell you. I won’t go after him alone.”

“You swear?”

Matt’s throat works. He rubs a hand over his mouth. “I swear to you, Darcy. I won’t go after Frank Castle alone. I don’t—I won’t.”

 _Breathe, girl. In and out and in again._ She can’t relax, but at least the knot isn’t winding tighter. _I don’t know if I can believe you this time, and God, God, that hurts._

“What’s the third thing?” Matt says, and okay. Worst conversation in the history of ever. She sits back on her heels, and wipes her face.

“Before—before that, I need you to answer a question, Matt, and I—I really need you to be honest with me.” She’s crying again, and she really, really doesn’t want to be, but she can’t seem to stop. “When Castle—when he had the gun to my head, he said that either you killed him, or he killed me. And you pulled the trigger.” Darcy swallows. “Were you trying to kill him?”

He’s turned paper-white again. “Darcy—”

“Answer the question.”

“I don’t—”

“Matt,” she says. “ _Answer the question._ ”

He opens his mouth, and shuts it. Opens it again. Swallows. She thinks he might gag. “Yes,” he says. “I—yes. I was.”

Darcy closes her eyes, leans back on her heels. _Okay._ “Okay.” _In and out, girl, come on._ “Then I really—I really need you to think about who you’re actually talking to, when you try to make me feel guilty for wanting to kill Frank Castle. Because if that’s true, Matt, if you were trying to kill him to save my life, then—then I really don’t think it’s me you’re trying to punish. I think you’re trying to punish yourself for wanting him dead, and that—that isn’t fair. Not to you, or to me, or to any of us.”

He curls one hand up into a loose fist against the mats, dips his head, doesn’t look at her. Darcy heaves herself to her feet, and bends, presses her lips to the top of his head, resting her fingers to his shoulder. Matt hesitates, and then very, very lightly he touches his fingers to the back of her hand, like he’s afraid she’ll smack him away. She doesn’t move.

“I wanted to kill him,” he says.

“So did I,” she says. “Because I saw you die, right in front of me. I still want to hurt him. And that scares the hell out of me, Matt, so I can understand why you’re feeling that way. But you don’t get to take your fear and your guilt and your frustration and whatever else it is that you’re trying to avoid on me. Not ever. And if you do it again, then yeah. Maybe the next time I leave the apartment it’s going to take a lot longer for me to come back than a couple of days.”

Matt freezes. He doesn’t speak, doesn’t twitch. He barely even breathes. Darcy wipes at her eyes with the back of her free hand. “I need to meet with Melvin to design something to replace my taser. Have Foggy text me, if you’re not going to be at the apartment tonight.”

Matt turns his face up to her. Darcy kisses his forehead, very, very carefully. Then she steps away from him, slips out of the ring, and leaves.

She’s more than halfway to Battery Park when she starts crying, and even when the jackass across from her on the subway stares, she can’t really make herself stop.


	6. Tabula Rasa

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And with this we begin the shift from actual S2 canon to TSoD stuff. Which, I mean, has been happening bit by bit, but at the same time this is...kind of way more drastic. 
> 
> Gratuitous _In The Heights_ reference because I can.
> 
> Content warning: vague description of child abuse, vague description of death/murder/decomposition, mentions of self-harm, PTSD discussion, mutism, and extreme anger issues, discussion of police brutality, discussion of rape, and canon-typical violence.

Karen’s been settled into Mug Shots for a good hour before Kate shows up. She’s dressed in black—well, black with purple highlights, anyway. She’d stopped streaking her hair when the whole Hawkeye thing had started, but she still can’t seem to let go of the color. “It’s thematic,” she’d said, when Karen had asked her once. “But, y’know, I liked it even before the whole sharpshooter thing started, so Clint can go suck an egg, I’m not copying him.”

It suits her, Karen thinks. The purple. The suit she’s pulled on. It might hang wrong on other people, vigilantism, being a hero, but it suits Kate. She’s settled completely into her own skin in the past year, and whatever marks are still left behind by everything that happened with the Goodmans, she’s being very careful to keep them hidden. Sometimes her disguise is so good that it’s as if nothing ever happened at all.

_Not that you can say much different, Karen._

( _Do you really think this is the first time—_ )

“I ordered for you,” Karen says absently, as Kate kicks the chair out on the opposite side of her table and drops down. “It should be waiting up at the counter.”

“You keep buying me food and I’m wondering if it’s bribery.” Kate pushes her sunglasses up into her hair, and snaps her gum. There’s a scrape on the side of her neck like she’d rolled wrong on asphalt, but other than that she looks mostly okay. Not like Darcy, with her bruised nose and her red eyes, or like Matt, whose head still looks as though someone took a Tommy gun to it and didn’t say sorry. “You trying to get me to do something for you, Page?”

“Can’t I just be nice?”

“Not when you’ve spent the past two days straight going over those files, you haven’t.”

Karen snorts. “Yeah, well. Oh, there’s one for Ben too. Grab it, will you?”

“And now I know it’s bribery,” says Kate, but still, she gets up, and goes to collect her drink from the counter. ( _Red,_ Karen thinks. They’re deep in the red, and she barely has enough money to pay for her own coffee, let alone Kate’s or Ben's, but she can’t regret doing that now. Another bill had come in this morning, and she hadn’t even bothered to open it. It’s locked in Foggy’s drawer with every other past due notice she’d managed to scrounge out of the mail pile.) Kate comes back with an iced coffee she’s laced with cinnamon, doctored to her precise specifications. She draws one knee up against her chest, tipping her head to watch. “Whatcha doing?”

“Trying to find Frank Castle’s war record and failing.” Karen hits the space bar on her computer a few times. Her phone buzzes. _Santino: Found another one, she wants to talk to you._ She turns off the screen of her phone before Kate notices. “I’ve been online with a technical assistant with the Marine Corps and he hasn’t been able to give me anything. I’ve been stonewalled everywhere else.”

“That’s legal of you.”

“I’m not good enough to break into a website controlled by part of the US military, Kate, and I don’t even want to try, that just—that seems like a shortcut to getting my ass kicked in a million kinds of ways I don’t even want to contemplate.”

“Generally going after the military does,” says a voice. Ben’s taken to sneaking in side doors, lately. It always makes her jump. “Looks like neither of you have slept all that much, the past few days.”

“Ben, hi.” He squeezes her shoulder, and sits down. “I mean, no. There’s—there’s been a lot of stuff, I don’t know. Lots of stuff means not a lot of sleep.”

“And coffee,” Kate says, and toasts them both. She puts her cup down, and rests her chin on her knee. “So what’s with the council of war, Karen? Especially considering the Golden Trio are absent.”

“Golden Trio?” Ben echoes.

“Harry, Ron and Hermione,” says Kate. “Which makes us Ginny, Luna, and Neville, and I’m claiming Ginny, but only if we’re talking book Ginny. Asian Ginny Weasley is my jam. Though I would look awful with red hair, let’s be real, here.”

Ben gives her a look. “Sometimes I’m glad that there’s a generational gap between us.”

“You are a sarcastic, rude, pushy little man, and you are my favorite.” Kate knocks her head to Ben’s shoulder, and then sits up straight again. “So yeah, seriously. Karen. What’s the sitch?”

“Asian Kim Possible’s not a bad idea either,” says Karen. She closes the chat window with the website advisor, and shuts her computer. “I just—look. I wanted to talk to both of you because I know you—you’re working on the Reyes thing, Ben, I know you won’t talk about it yet, but you are. And you’re sneaky, so I wanted you in on it, too, Kate.”

“Digging things up about Samantha Reyes is like sifting through a bucket of needles looking for pushpins. They just keep stabbing.” Ben crosses his arms over his chest, and leans back in his chair. “This about everything that’s been happening, lately?”

“Yeah, I mean—yes. You said that your source, whoever they were—” She lowers her voice. “You said they told you to look into Frank Castle.”

“Yeah, and so far it’s been a dead end.” Ben eyes her computer. “Like I’m guessing you’re finding. No real military record, aside from enlistment. Man’s a ghost. Told you that yesterday.”

“I know, it’s just—” Karen goes to bite her thumbnail, and stops when she finds the band-aid. “I might have something. I just—I wanted to ask both of you a favor.”

“Shoot, girl, shoot.” Katie makes a finger gun. “I am at your service.”

“What kind of favor?” Ben says, eyebrows snapping together. “Is this an information favor or a reckless endangerment Karen Page special kind of favor?”

Karen looks at the counter. The baristas—Kimmy’s moved on with her life, but there are a few new ones that aren’t completely terrible, and they don’t mind her sitting here until two in the morning when they finally close up shop, which is great—aren’t paying attention, and neither is anyone else. Still, she bites her lip. “Um, the special. Might be illegal.”

“I like illegal,” Kate says. “I’m practically an Avenger, I can do illegal. What’s the illegal?”

“Breaking and entering.”

Ben pushes his glasses up his nose. “What for?”

“I talked to a guy today.” She shoves her computer into her bag. “He used to work at Metro-General Hospital, he was—he was one of the nurses who treated the guy we’re looking for. Managed to get his ass fired when he helped him with something.”

“Someone actually helped Castle do anything?” Kate whistles through her front teeth. “I mean, that’s what nurses do, y’know, help the helpless, but that seems kinda—huh.”

“I’m choosing to think he did it out of the goodness of his heart.” Her shoes are pinching at her toes again, and she really should probably go home and change out of her work clothes before doing this, but she just—she needs to move. She needs to do something before she explodes. “I found an address, I was wondering if either of you wanted to come out and take a look at it with me.”

“An address?”

“I want to break into Frank Castle’s house.”

Ben looks into his mug of coffee, and then wipes his hands over his face. “Ah, shit. You sure it’s his house?”

“Pretty sure. The guy who told me the address was scared out of his mind, that seems like enough of a guarantee in my book.”

“How’d you find this guy?”

“DA files.”

“How’d you get DA files?”

“A guy. Maybe the same person who contacted you, I don’t know.” Karen wipes the sweat from her palms. “But I just—don’t you think it’s weird that there’s literally nothing about this on the air right now? That—I can’t shake the feeling that there’s something deeper, Ben, I really can’t. And I know you feel the same way, you wouldn’t still be looking into Reyes otherwise.”

He rubs his eyes. “Depending on what it is, you could get into a lot of shit real damn quick.”

“That’s why I’m asking for help.” She takes a breath. “I—we’re a team, we don’t do things alone. All of us. And so I wanted—I wanted to ask.” 

Kate slurps at her straw as if to punctuate it, and turns to look out the window. “I mean, I’m always down for some B & E. It’ll be fun, I promise.”

“No,” Ben says. “You do this with me, you go by my rules. We don’t make it fun.”

“Ben, you sly fox,” says Kate. “Since when do you break and enter?”

“It’s called investigative reporting, and since before your mother was out of diapers, so shut up.” He takes off his glasses, and rubs at his nose again. “Your friends know about this?”

“No.” She bites her lip. “I don’t want to tell them until I have something, and just—I don’t want to stress them right now. And besides. I felt like they might try to stop me.”

She waits. Ben sips at his coffee, and puts it back down again. His glasses slip down the bridge of his nose. He needs to shave, she thinks. He needs to shave and sleep just like the rest of them, but damned if he will, Ben Urich. Finally, he sighs. “At least you’re not stupid enough to go off alone.”

Karen snorts. “I mean, it’s me.”

“I can’t go, not tonight. Someone ought to stay here and keep an eye on things, just in case.” He looks at Karen, then at Kate. “But you’ll keep me updated. And you’re giving me those files, Miss Page.”

“I’m loaning them,” Karen says. “Team, remember?”

Ben flaps his hand, and goes back to his coffee. “If you have to get sappy about it.”

When Kate smiles, it’s all curve and blade and icicles in her eyes. “Where do we start?”

.

.

.

Darcy winds up spending three hours in the garage, which is two hours longer than she’d originally intended, going over the designs for the new weapon. The chain that Castle had used to tie Matt to the pillar, that had been an awful thing, something she never wants to see used like that again, but some of the shit he’d managed to pull off with it in the fight to get out of the building…Christ. _That,_ she’d thought, watching a light fixture burst, _that, I want that_ , and when she’d brought it up to Melvin he’d been so tremendously excited about figuring out how to layer electrical current through the thing that she’s pretty sure he didn’t hear a word she’d said after _can we do a whip, or is that too complicated?_ Not to mention the way he gets all twitchy when he sees what she’s done to the suit, the repairs he has to make. Thankfully it’s only a tear in the cloth, no damage to the armor plating, but he still gives her a look like she’s slaughtered a bucket of kittens. It doesn’t help that Betsy’s coughing in the back of the room in an effort to smother her laughter.

“A week,” he says. “Gimme a week. I can finish the whip by then. Needs layering. Gonna take time.”

So yeah, three hours, instead of one, which means when she walks out of the garage again she’s blinking not in sunlight but in the soft yellow of the streetlamps and the pink-orange of the sunset. She stares at the setting sun through the angle of the buildings for as long as she can manage it, until her eyes start burning, and then carefully she takes a breath and gets back on the subway, getting off at the closest stop to Metro-General.

She doesn’t go in. It seems like a stupid idea, to go in. Like she’s asking for trouble. So she stands across the street, and she watches people trundling in and out of the front doors, listens to the ambulances and the conversations and the city. She leans her good shoulder against the brick of a building, and watches it, hood up and her eyes swollen, wondering where Elliot Grote is inside. She doesn’t know, exactly, where they would have put him, or what his diagnosis is, or what’ll happen to him from now on. She’s not even sure what’ll happen to him in a week, because she’s fairly certain he doesn’t have the money for the hospital to draw on for his care, and if nobody comes forward to pay for it then...well. Where the hell is Elliot going to go?

He might have a DNR, she realizes. They might not resuscitate. He might die in there, because she hit him in the head harder than she’s ever hit anyone, and she still doesn’t regret doing it.

“Didn’t expect to see you here.”

It’s Father P. He looks, she thinks, like he’s overheating, what with his collar and the black clothes and all the sweat shining on the top of his bald head. Even his short sleeves aren’t helping all that much. He’s carrying his briefcase in one hand and a little bouquet of what look like daisies in the other, and for a second she’s so confused—because where did he come from, anyway? She can’t remember hearing anyone get close enough to startle her—that all she can do is blink at him. Darcy pulls her hood back, but she doesn’t leave the alleyway.

“Hey.” Her voice crackles, popping leaves in a campfire. Darcy clears her throat. “What are you doing here, Father P?”

“Heard that one of my parishioners was hospitalized recently.” He’s giving her a very sharp look. Darcy stares hard at the ground rather than meet his eyes, because Christ, she’s pretty sure he heard it from Matt, or at least that Matt’s mentioned it, or something, she doesn’t know, and she _does not want to talk about Elliot Grote._ “I don’t think he’ll have anyone else coming to visit him. As I recall, he didn’t have anyone in particular who would care enough. But it seemed sad, a man lying alone in a hospital bed with no one to visit him.” He shrugs. “Besides, it gets me out of St. Patrick’s before two in the morning.”

Darcy clears her throat. “Burning the midnight oil?”

“In a way. Trying to make sure that parts of the cathedral don’t get destroyed.” There’s that sharp look again, but more amused this time. “What are you doing here? Seems like it’s too hot a night for you to be hiding in an alleyway when you could be sitting in the air conditioning like anyone else sane.”

Darcy laughs. She scuffs her shoe over the pavement. “I mean—I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking all that much about it, really, just—wanted to stand somewhere.”

Father P knocks the bouquet of daisies against his leg. Then he slips into the alleyway with her, standing at the edge of the shadows. He looks towards Metro-General, cocking his head to get the right angle, eyeing the lights and the doors and the white ambulances and the cop cars and all of the rest. “Been busy the past few nights,” he says, studiously casual. “I’ve been hearing some interesting things.”

“It’s been a barrel of monkeys.” Darcy shoves her hands into her hoodie pockets. “I should probably go. I need to get some work done.”

“Never slow down, any of you.” Father P taps his daisies again, and then bends, settling his briefcase on the ground. “Looks like you haven’t been sleeping much.”

“I never slept all that much before.” Darcy shrugs. “Now it’s just figuring out how to catch naps without people realizing that you’re asleep at the office.”

“Fairly certain that a lot of people who don’t have night jobs try that, too. It doesn’t always work out too well.”

“Well, I mean, my office is kind of weird.” Her knuckles hurt. So does the scuff from the bullet, pounding over her ribs. She needs to pop more aspirin, but it would feel really weird to do that in front of a priest. _For God’s sake, Darcy, it’s not like you’re going to snort coke in front of him, it’s a painkiller, just take the freaking pill._ She leaves it in her bag. “Sorry to have canceled the past two weeks.”

“Ah, you weren’t the only one. And you have far more extenuating circumstances than birthday parties or unexpected work shifts.” He cuts a look at her from under his eyebrows. “I’d still consider finding a way to carve an hour out of your weekend schedule to at least break your bard out of jail, but if you can’t manage that, then I’ll just tell them you’re ill.”

Her lips twitch. She can’t manage the full smile. Darcy presses her back to the brick, and watches Metro-General for a few minutes more. She should go—they don’t have a lot of time before Castle starts in on something new, and even if she’s fighting with Matt, she’s not about to let him go out and fight alone, especially now—but it’s…oddly, it’s the easiest interaction she’s had all day. And she’s an atheist Jew talking to a devout Catholic priest.

“You doing okay?” he says, after a moment, and there goes the easiness, flying right out the window to land splat on the pavement thirty stories below. Darcy knocks her head against the brick a few times.

“I’m so sick of people asking me that, y’know? Just—not just people I know, but people I don’t. People keep pulling me aside, you know, giving me names and numbers, _you can go here if you need to_ , and just—I’m so _sick_ of people asking me if I’m all right. I’m not all right. I just kind of want to get back to my not being all right and not have people quiz me about it.”

Father P clasps the bouquet in both hands. The plastic wrapping crinkles when he spins it a little, thoughtfully. “Just means you have people who care, Darcy.”

“I’m not saying it’s rational, I’m just sick of hearing it.”

“Noted.”

The daisies are going to start to wilt, if he stands out here for much longer. She watches the bouquet spin between his fingers.

“You want to talk about it?” he says.

She taps at the wall with her heel. “About how people keep asking me if I’m all right or how I’m sick of hearing it?”

“About what has you not all right.”

Darcy bites down hard on the inside of her cheek. “You want the full story or the SparkNotes?”

“I’d rather not stay out in the heat any longer than I can help it. I’m old; I like my air conditioning and my spinning desk chair.”

Sometimes she really freaking loves Father Patrick Lantom. “You’ve probably heard half of it already.”

“I don’t think you realize how infrequently I hear from him,” says Father P. “He’s…sometimes I think he believes he’s not welcome in church. I haven’t seen him in months.”

“Before the past few days,” Darcy says, because it’s hanging in the air. “You mean you haven’t seen him in months before the past few days.”

Father P shrugs.

“What about him?” She tips her head towards Metro-General. “Elliot Grote ever tell you what he did?”

“Elliot rarely took confession,” says Father P. “And even when he did, I’m not at liberty to divulge what he said to me there. Whatever sins haunted him, they’re between him and God, and I just happened to be listening in.”

Darcy fists her hands up in the pocket of her hoodie. “Yeah, well, maybe someone other than your god ought to have been paying attention. Might have fixed something before innocent people managed to get in his way.”

Father P snaps a look at her. “What do you mean?”

Darcy presses her tongue up against the back of her teeth. “It doesn’t matter anymore, not really. I don’t think he’s going to get up again.”

“Not a lot of people get up again, after they hear from the pair of you,” says Father P. “Or if they do, they don’t get up the same.”

“That’s kind of the point.” She yanks her hood back on. “Today’s kind of been a shit day, Father P, I just—I should probably go.”

“Darcy,” he says. She stops, halfway out of the alleyway. “You think he deserved it?”

“What?”

“What happened to Elliot.” There’s a look on his face that she can’t quite define. She’s not sure if he’s sad, or confused, or both. “Do you think he deserved what happened to him?”

 _I’m the one who did it to him,_ she nearly says. _What do you think?_ “I think he’s a manipulative, cowardly little snake,” she says, “and I think he’s done a lot worse than you or I ever have, Father, and I’m not sure I’m all that bothered with the idea that he might never get back up. So yeah, I guess you could say I think he deserved it.”

“If that’s how you feel, then why are you standing out here looking in?” He taps the flowers into his free hand. “Why not go in? Why come here at all, if you think he’s deserved everything that’s brought him here, to live or die in a hospital bed with no one to come and wait at his bedside, no one who actually cares? If you feel like he deserves it, Darcy, why are you watching the door?”

Something aches. Deep inside her, something curls into a ball, and starts to keen. “He deserved it,” she says. “I don’t regret it.”

“Maybe he did, or maybe he didn’t. What happened to Elliot, it’s not up to me to say whether or not he deserved it. Sounds like you think he did, whatever it was, and maybe you’re right and maybe you’re wrong, but that’s not really up to you, either.”

“Who’s it up to, God?” She looks hard at the railing of the fire escape. “Some people just don’t have good left in them anymore, Father, and—and if Elliot Grote isn’t one of those people, I don’t know, maybe there’s something wrong with what I did to him. But it doesn’t change the fact that what he did was evil and he deserved to pay for it.”

“It’s not our call to judge.”

“Then whose call is it? Some—some great celestial presence that might not even exist? If we don’t do something to stop evil here, when we’re alive, what’s going to keep it from just coming back, over and over and over? What do we do if we don’t fight, Father P?”

The bouquet’s wilting. He shifts the flowers around until they’re facing away from the sun. “We do good, Darcy. It’s all we can do.”

“Some people in the world just aren’t capable of that, anymore.”

It’s definitely sadness creasing around his mouth. “You truly believe that there are people in the world who aren’t worth saving?”

“You think Fisk was worth saving?” She shakes her head. “What about this guy who’s been killing people, all over the Kitchen? You think he’s worth it? You think there’s goodness in him?”

"Do you?"

Ouch. "I asked you first."

“I think it’s not up for me to judge.”

“And that’s something I don’t get, because—look.” She wipes her hands over her face. “You’re right, okay? Evil’s real. I think—I think there are people in the world who are so corrupted, and terrible, and cruel, that they don’t _have_ anything good left inside them. I can’t look at what I do every night and think otherwise, anymore.”

“I can’t believe that,” says Father P simply. “I really can’t.”

“Yeah, well, I’m Jewish,” Darcy says. “I might be shit at it, but I am. Maybe that’s part of it, I don’t know, but with what I see, and what I know, and what I’ve heard—yeah, I can definitely believe that.”

Father P presses his lips together, and says nothing.

“I remember you telling me once that someone has to want to be helped before you can help them, and it’s the same with this, just—someone has to want to be good in order to manage it. If you don’t want it, then there’s nothing good left inside. And it’s something—I don’t know. I’ve thought that since Fisk. It’s not something that’s gonna change.”

He sighs. “You’re sure?”

“I don’t really have any way to make it clearer.” Darcy presses her forefinger and thumb hard into the scar on her palm from Nobu’s knife, into the cut that still aches some days, still tugs oddly at her muscles and tendons. “I don’t know if I have the energy for this, Father P, I really don’t, it’s just—it’s been a long few days, okay? And I might—I might be losing something I thought would be there forever and I’ve fought with everyone else I know the past few days and I came really close to doing something that I don’t—I just—” She kneads at her eyes. “I really don’t think this is a conversation I should be having right now.”

Father P’s quiet. “I see,” he says, after a moment, and looks into the daisy bouquet. Then, carefully, he plucks one of them free, snipping the long stem off with his thumbnail. He offers it to her. Darcy blinks, looking from the flower—small, white, fragile petals—to Father P, who’s waiting patiently for her to take it. When she doesn’t, he steps just close enough that she can catch hints of the smoke from the church, and he settles it behind her ear like she’s a hippie flower girl, like she’s a six year old on a field trip with her first grade class. He draws back just as quickly, like he’s afraid he’s invaded.

“Keep that,” he says, and then he steps out of the alley. She watches as he crosses the street and steps up into the hospital, and after, watches the doors close behind him and another ambulance runs screaming out of the parking lot.

She’s still standing there, watching, when Ben calls. Her Lilith phone, not her regular phone, the phone that barely ever goes off, the burner that she doesn’t like to use. She looks at it for a long time before she answers.

“There’s been a hit,” he says. “Today’s been busy. Are you up for working tonight?”

Darcy touches the daisy behind her ear. “Give me a little bit,” she says, and it’s Lilith speaking. “I need to change into better shoes.”

Stanley’s Bar is a wreck, and that’s saying something. She can’t remember the last time she’s seen the city this wrecked, this devastated. Not since the Incident, when the sky opened up and she’d thought that maybe the world was ending, that this would be how humanity would die, drowned in an oncoming sea of aliens from another dimension, of screaming monsters that she still has nightmares about, the rattling and the shouts and the wails and the explosions, listening to the howling animal wails of dying people and knowing that she might be next. Over the past few days, though, she’s seen places coming close. The wreck of the Burren Club, bullet holes in the walls like something out of a warzone. And now this, blood everywhere, shattered glass, cops crawling all over it like ants on a dead rat. Darcy doesn’t try to get closer. She perches, settled into her fire escape on the next building over, and she watches the flashing lights and the movement and the people crowding the caution tape, searching. Matt, she thinks, is probably already on his way. “Give me half an hour,” he’d said, when she’d called, and it had taken him so long to pick up the phone she’d thought that he wouldn’t. Kate had never picked up at all.

 _Stop stressing._ She clasps one of the railings, watching Brett duck under the tape and vanish into the decimated bar. _She’s probably just doing something tonight and didn’t hear the phone._

The daisy from Father P is tucked neatly into one of her pockets, folded up in paper and kept away from anything that could stain it.

Ben notices her before anyone else does. He’s probably been watching for her, she thinks, as he cuts away from the crowd and edges back, careful not to look at anyone, not to meet anyone’s eyes. He slips away from badgering the officers protecting the perimeter and comes to a stop at the head of the alley, his back to her, watching. Darcy drops down onto the ground, and says, “You never call with nice things to say.”

“You want someone calling with nice things to say, you should have picked another line of work,” says Ben shortly. He keeps his back to her, folding his arms over his chest. “Looks like a shitshow in there. Tape’s only been up for an hour, they’re not even close to getting through that crime scene. Haven’t managed to hear everything, but it sounds like the Irish are on the prowl.”

“Which family?”

“Brannigans. They’re not too happy that their new golden boy was one of the men shot and killed at the Burren Club.”

“Golden boy?”

“Kelly Brannigan. His father flew in from Dublin this morning. Before your time. Finn Brannigan. Used to own a lot of the drug-running rackets in Hell’s Kitchen, before Fisk came in and strong-armed the Irish out of their own neighborhoods.” He turns his head, just enough that she can see the frames of his glasses, red light playing over the black plastic. “Seems like they’re out looking for your boy, Lilith.”

“Me and the Punisher aren’t anywhere close to friends, and I definitely wouldn’t call him a boy.” The baton feels cold against her leg. “If the Irish are looking for him, probably means they want blood.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t blame ‘em. He’s turned the whole city into his damn playground.” Ben turns to watch the cops again. “He owes me a new back window for my car.”

“I’ll be sure to tell him that, on top of everything else. He’ll probably oblige.”

“I could do without the snark.”

“And yet sadly it is my only setting.” She taps her fingers against the hilt of the knife. “You have any idea where the Brannigans could be holing up?”

“Used to be they controlled half the Kitchen, but these days, they’ve been crammed down in pockets of maybe a block or two. Most of them have been cleaned out by Castle. Doubt any of the old addresses I have would still be good, and even if they were, no way to say that they’d be in use right now.” Ben adjusts his glasses. “Where’s Hornhead? Figured he’d be all over this.”

Hornhead’s a new one. “He’s on his way,” she says. She thinks she manages to keep the ache out of her voice, but judging by the way Ben shifts, she probably didn’t succeed as well as she’d like. “Figured we’d have one or two more days before Castle started pulling some moves like Master Chief the Sith Lord.”

“I’ll have to put that in your biography, when I write it,” Ben says. “When in doubt, relied upon visual media references.”

“Better than curling up in a corner and crying.” She pulls her baton from the holster, and then shoves it back in, a nervous habit she’d picked up with her taser. “You heard anything from your Wart, Merlin?”

“Some. She’s looking into it on her end. Wondering what you know.”

She blows out air. “Not much more. We think he’s a Marine. Served in Iraq, Afghanistan. Has background with sniper rifles, hand-to-hand, grenades, explosives, any number of things. Could mean Special Ops, could mean that he’s just well-rounded. Full name’s Frank Castle. Don’t know if that helps with anything.”

“Frank Castle’s a name I’ve been hearing a lot lately.” Ben shrugs. “Haven’t managed to dig up much. No real service record. Birth certificate, no death certificate. Man’s a ghost.”

“You think he wiped himself off the map in case anyone went looking?”

“It’s possible, but it’s a damn good job for one man if he did.”

“Like I said, Special Ops, maybe.”

“Mm.” He tips his head. “Sure you want to be standing here talking to me when there are angry Irish wandering around tearing the city apart looking for this guy?”

“I’m not entirely certain I ever should have started talking to you at all,” Darcy says, and Ben snorts. “You make life difficult for bad people, Ben Urich, you need to watch your back before someone shoots you in it.”

“Shoots, not stabs?”

There’s a soft sound from the fire escape. Matt, crouched, police lights flickering over the horns. She nods once, putting her finger to her lips, and when he points at the opposite end of the alley, Darcy sends him a thumb’s up. It’s easier, she thinks, to pretend it’s not Matt Murdock under the mask right now. She can work with Daredevil. She can’t quite look at Matt, at the moment.

“Knives don’t seem to be the order of the day anymore.” There’s a rubbernecker trying to take a video of the crime scene with his phone. She watches as one of the new officers at the 15th takes the thing from him. “Seriously, Ben, watch it. The DA has her hands all over this, and she has a history of making sure that other people fall down in the shit and she comes out clean.”

“Like I haven’t faced that before.” He rocks from foot to foot. “You made a deal with me, Lilith. Anything you hear about Frank Castle, you bring it to me first. Don’t go leaking it to other papers. And don’t give it to Wart to give to me, I want it from you.”

“You’re the one and only reporter for me, Ben, you know that.”

By the time he turns around, Darcy’s already vanished back into the shadows behind the dumpster. She waits until he snorts, until he steps away muttering under his breath about “damn dramatics,” before she turns and follows Matt to the end of the alley, turning the corner and leaving Stanley’s Bar behind.

Matt’s quiet. It’s not the same kind of quiet from the walk back from the rooftop across from the Dogs of War bar front, not the same kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop. He’s quiet, and it’s an achy quiet, and Darcy’s quiet because she has no idea what to say to him, not really, not at the moment. Months and months ago she’d been afraid of this happening, a fight that would tear and wind its way under their skin until even the simplest things are impossible to say. _If it affects our work, the firm, Foggy and Karen and Kate, all of it, I don’t_ —but no, that’s something everyone risks, anyone who trusts someone risks losing them eventually. She’s just not sure she can lose Matt, not really.

_I can’t lose you._

Matt’s in the wrong here, she tells herself. She knows that, for a fact. No matter what angle she looks at it from, no matter what he’d been _trying_ to do, or telling himself he’d been trying to do, he’d made a promise to her and he’d broken it, and that isn’t something easily fixed. That’s not something that can be repaired with a _sorry_ and a few gestures, because right back at the start, months and months ago when she’d still been reeling from what Nobu had done and the knowledge that her best friend was the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen, she’d told him that if he ever lied to her, she would leave, and just—God. That isn’t this, she doesn’t _want_ to leave, but they’re traipsing far too close to the edge for her, and it’s terrifying. She’s freefalling, and she doesn’t know if he’s going to catch her, or if she’ll hit the ground.

“I’ve heard of Finn Brannigan,” says Matt. Or Daredevil. It’s easier to think of it as Daredevil saying it. “Used to run a lot of betting circles, a lot of drug rings. Left the business to his brother, and when his brother died he sent his son over from Dublin to manage the Brannigan family.”

“And now his kid’s dead and there are a lot of people looking for Frank Castle.” She can handle talking to him about this, about people they don’t know, about things that don’t have anything to do with the pair of them and the open hole in her heart. “You think they’ve found him?”

“Possible.” He hesitates. “We should check the Port Authority apartment. If Castle hasn’t been there in the past few days, then it’s at least a place we know he isn’t.”

“Is that a suggestion?” Darcy says, very carefully. Matt’s jaw clenches.

“An idea.”

She turns it over in her head. “The apartment,” she says. “I don’t think he’ll be there, that’d be the first place anyone would look, but he might have left something behind.”

He hasn’t. Aside from a lot of bloody gauze in the bathroom garbage can, and the empty chain where the dog Ripper used to be, there’s no hint Frank Castle has been here at all. The door’s been broken a second time, though, wood fractured all along the deadbolt, and Darcy touches her gloved fingers to it. They’d come from the next building over, this time, down the fire escape to the window. She hadn’t felt particularly bad smashing it with her baton.

“Men were here,” Matt says.

“Irish?”

“Probably.” He crouches. “Fresh blood on the floor.”

That’s that, then. She heaves herself back out the window. “Ben didn’t have any addresses that were worth anything.”

Matt looks at the half-shattered window, and then kicks a few final pieces of broken glass into the apartment before passing her, taking the stairs two at a time. He waits until they’re on the rooftop before he says, “Asked Brett. He didn’t have anything either.”

Brett probably wouldn’t have been happy to see Daredevil. Actually, she’s pretty sure Brett would have been happier to see Hitler. “I’ll bet.” Darcy sucks her teeth. “Still leaves us with nothing. Turk’s back in custody. We could always stay here and listen to the radio transponder. Unless you want to go ringing people’s chimes and trying to get a few words out of them.”

He shrugs, like beating the shit out of people to get them to give him an address is nothing. “Might work.”

“I don’t—” She stops. “Hold on.”

“What?”

“Lemme think.” She chews on her lip, digs her teeth into her tongue. There’s no guarantee of this one, nothing that’ll say it might work, especially considering it’s been months since she’s spoken with the woman, but—“We need to get to Midtown North.”

The last time she’d seen Brigid O’Reilly had been at a party post-winning the Bishop lawsuit against one Rich Goodman, serial rapist and drug dealer. It maybe hadn’t been the most professional idea, attending an event where people she’d called as witnesses were sure to show up, but Kate and Brigid had bonded, and Brigid had helped them with looking into the yakuza; they’d already broken the professional barrier way before the months-long slog of the Goodman case had ended. (In spite of everything going down with Fisk, in spite of all the evidence and charges, it had still been a tooth-and-nail fight to get the Goodmans to pay a goddamn cent. She’s still incredibly proud of herself that they’d managed it, especially considering by that point she’d been running on three hours of sleep most nights. _Especially_ considering that after Landman and Zack crashed and burned the Goodmans had dragged out a lawyer from Hogarth, Chao, and Benowitz, and hadn’t that been a bundle of joy.) Brigid hadn’t filed a suit for getting shuffled around in the Fisk bullshit, hadn’t wanted to get too deeply involved in going after the NYPD, and yeah, in some ways, Darcy can respect that; the corrupt cops who’d moved her to the 34th after she’d filed Kate’s rape had been taken down, and half the firms in the city were still caught up in all the bullshit that Fisk had left behind. Still, she’d applied to move a different precinct, and administrative services had shifted her from Washington Heights to Midtown North, which was amusing to Darcy for a lot of reasons but mostly because of St. Patrick’s Cathedral being in that beat. The transfer had gone through about a month ago. Logically, she should be around here somewhere.

It’s a long shot. She’s never spoken to Brigid as anyone other than Darcy Lewis, and Kate’s never once mentioned to Brigid anything she does with Lilith and Daredevil. Brigid’s smart enough to have worked out that Kate’s Hawkeye, Darcy thinks—there are only a few people in the world who can use a bow like Kate, and the only other person in the entirety of the eastern seaboard who can manage it is Clint Barton—but Kate’s never mentioned anything about it to Darcy, and Darcy’s never asked. So yeah, going to see Brigid to ask about Irish mobsters? Long shot. Way more than a longshot. Impossible shot. But she knows Brigid’s good, she knows Brigid knows Kate, and she knows that Brigid has a tendency to stick her nose into every major gang event in the city, and that’s a combination she can’t turn down right now.

Brigid’s not at the precinct. She’s out, and judging by the chatter Matt overhears on one of the phones inside, she’s not in her car, either. “Walking,” he says, and tips his head to listen. Darcy crouches down on the edge of the building, pulling her baton from the holster and whacking it against her palm. It stings a little, but she keeps doing it, because it gives her something to do with her hands and some reason not to watch Matt as he sifts through sound and smell, picking through the sea of people in the park until he can finally zero in on Brigid O’Reilly. Someone’s organized a festival for Latin American food things, judging by the number of flags hanging around. _In the heights, I hang my flag up on display,_ she thinks, and it’s not really the right time to be thinking of musicals, but she can’t get the song out of her head. _It reminds me that I came from miles away._

God. Atlanta. Eli. This isn’t the time to be thinking about this, not really, but the song’s looping, and her brain’s racing, and all she can do right now is wait for Matt to give her a location for Brigid, so she’s trapped in it. Eli and Atlanta and sticky nights stealing apples from Eli’s kitchen table. The bruises and the marks and the things she’d never said, never even asked him, because how does a child ask what it’s like for your father to pin you down and gag you and hit you, over and over, with a belt, with a stick, with anything that Eli’s father had at hand? How do you ask that, as a child, going to school and knowing that other kids didn’t have parents like her mother, like Eli’s father, that other kids didn’t have to worry about walking in to find her mother drunk on the kitchen floor or coming home to realize that his father had had a bad day and there was only one person he could take it out on? You don’t know how to ask. You don’t have the vocabulary for it. Not at nine. So she hadn’t asked, and Eli had vanished, one night when she’d been asleep. The next time anyone had seen him had been when a group of kids had tripped on a garbage bag down at the docks and torn it open and they’d seen a child’s hand through the black plastic.

She doesn’t let herself think about it, most of the time. She never really likes to remember the time right after Eli died. The pain, first. Raw, the rawest thing she’d ever felt (and had ever felt since, until she’d seen Nobu’s blade hook under Matt’s ribs, until she’d turned the corner and the gun had gone off, _bang_ ). Her whole body had been an open wound for months. She’d skipped school for a week, until her teachers had finally caught on to the fact that Lorna Lewis’s girl had gone missing and called to let her mother know that if she didn’t personally drop Darcy off every morning for a month CPS would be called. (She can’t remember speaking to a single person that whole month, either, not until she overheard her mom on the phone with the school therapist and they’d brought up _psych eval_ and _self-harm_ and _mutism_ and _post-traumatic stress disorder_ and started talking in class just to keep them out of her head.) The wounds had never closed up, really, just…kind of faded into the background, and she’s not sure if that means she stopped feeling the pain or just stopped remembering to notice it.

Then Eli’s father had switched shifts. She can remember seeing him when she’d walked to school in the morning, when she’d walked back at night. She’d been terrified for a week, convinced he knew she knew, but the longer it went on and he’d never once looked at her, the faster the terror had shifted over into something completely inhuman. From terror to hate. From terror to _rage_ , a towering kind of rage that had swallowed anything and everything, chewed her up and spit her out and split her skin from the inside, a living thing latched into her guts, feeding on her life. It had probably been six months after Eli’s body was found that she rolled over in bed, stared at the ceiling, and first thought, _I could kill him, and no one would ever know._

She’d planned so many different ways to do it. It had been the only thing she thought about, for years. She’d kept her grades up to keep the teachers from asking too many questions, came home with dyed hair, forged her mother’s signature on a permission slip and had the chains inked into her wrist. The pain and then the anger, and the fear of that anger, so thick it choked her. She’d loathed and feared Oliver Bletchley, and she’d loathed and feared herself, and it hadn’t ended when her mother had announced one morning that they were moving, and to pack her things. It still hasn’t ended. She’s built a new life, come to a new city, found a new family, and there’s some part of her that’s still trapped in that kitchen in Atlanta, Georgia, the blood on the floor, the blare of the TV, and the look on Eli’s face when the belt had come down again.

She’d hated Fisk. She’d wanted Fisk dead for everything he’d done, for all the crimes he’d ever committed, for all the people he’d ever harmed. She’d wanted Fisk dead and she’d wanted to be the one to do it, as revenge, but comparing what she’d felt for Fisk, or for Wesley who’d tried to steal Karen, or for Nobu who had tried to kill Matt; to compare any of that to what she felt to Eli’s father…no. That hate had _seethed._ That had had years and years to develop, to grow, to nest inside her in a way that she’s never been able to drag loose. _That’s_ what’s burst back up out of the dark. She’d stoked it, pruned it down, honed it and turned it into something cleaner than what it was at the root, purer, saner, but now, because of Frank Castle, it’s exploded back into life and she can’t shove it back. It’s something wild, and cruel, and merciless, an ocean without end all trapped inside her, something not even she knows the full scope of, and _Frank Castle had seen it._ He’d looked at her for a minute, for a breath, and he’d picked it out, the thing she’s spent actual years burying so deep inside her skin that not even Matt, who’s known her since she was eighteen, who’s loved her for almost as long, Matt who has senses beyond anything that a normal human should be able to have—Frank Castle had seen it, and Matt hadn’t. ( _Hadn’t seen it?_ a little voice asks. _Or hadn’t wanted to?_ She crushes it back down.) Some part of her hates Castle for that, because this man who kills the way he does, who takes so many lives, who gets under her skin and makes her question everything—he shouldn’t have been able to see it. Not if Matt didn’t. Or couldn’t.

_Christ, I still want him dead._

(Fisk or Bletchley or Nobu or Grotto or Wesley or Castle, she’s not sure anymore, not really, all of them are melding together, all the people who have ever taken someone she loves away from her, anyone who’s tried to hurt someone that belongs to her—)

And she _can’t want that._ She doesn’t want to remember it, but she knows it, in her bones. She _can’t_ want that. If she wants this, if she lets it control her, then she’ll be Fisk; she’ll be Wesley; she’ll be Nobu; she’ll be Oliver Bletchley; she’ll be Frank Castle. She’ll _be_ them, and the thought of that is acid in her lungs, mustard gas rolling down her throat. She can’t want it. But she does.

“Five blocks,” Matt says. Darcy jumps. She hadn’t realized she’d stopped passing her baton from hand to hand until this second, until she’d curled her fingers over the handle again and the point of it had echoed against the rooftop. Matt points down the street, past St. Patrick’s. “That way.”

“Yeah.” Darcy stands. “You want to talk to her?”

“She’ll probably try to shoot me.”

 _Like that’s ever stopped you before._ It’s on the tip of her tongue. Darcy bites it back. “No guarantee she won’t shoot me, either.”

“Brigid doesn’t like men too much. Might have better luck with you.”

Well, that, at least, is true. Darcy slips her baton back into the holster. “Fine. I’ll go first. Just—if she tries to shoot me, don’t hit her too hard.”

“Fine,” Matt says in a tight voice, and drops down onto the fire escape.

Brigid standing on a corner when they track her down, rocking back and forth on her feet like she’s thinking. She looks the same, Darcy thinks. Late thirties, dark hair cut close in a cut that’s closer to a buzz than a bob. She’s in long sleeves, even in this weather. Darcy doesn’t blame her. Hard enough being a beat cop and a woman, she thinks, as she clambers hand over hand down to the ground. Makes it harder when you add in a prosthetic arm. She’d never asked Brigid what happened, and Brigid had never offered, but it makes things complicated.

“Her partner’s half a block down,” says Matt into her comm bud. Which he could have told her on the roof, but maybe—she hopes—he’s been having just as much trouble talking to her in person as she has with him. “Try to get her into the alley.”

“Brigid’s not one for subterfuge.”

Matt makes a noise like he wants to argue, but keeps his mouth shut. Darcy looks up at the windows. There’s a girl watching through from one of the apartments, dark, a Puerto Rican flag hung on the back wall of her bedroom. Darcy blows her a kiss, and drops the last few feet down to the ground before she draws her baton and taps it, very gently, against the metal of the dumpster.

Brigid turns, and goes stiff. Darcy’s standing mostly in the dark, still, but she knows exactly what Brigid’s looking at. Lilith, not Darcy Lewis. Dark hair and dark lipstick and streaks of blue running down her arms, an armored uniform and a weapon in the dark. Brigid rests a hand to her gun, and darts a glance down the road at her partner.

“You’re out of your zip code,” says Brigid. She still sounds like smoke, hoarse and husky and torn. “What the hell are you doing out here?”

“Looking for you.” Darcy doesn’t let go of her baton. “Wanted to ask a favor.”

Brigid blinks, and blinks again. She glances at her partner. When she takes two steps forward, it’s still with her hand on her gun and her face turned, like she’s going to radio in to dispatch any second. Still, she doesn’t laugh, and she doesn’t shout for help, and that’s two points in her favor. “Like I said. Way out of your zip code.”

“But you’ve been hearing about the Irish, same as the rest of us.” She looks up at the window with the girl, the Puerto Rican flag. “And I’m betting some of the cartel hits have come through here too. Not as many, but you had to have heard about them.”

Brigid rolls her eyes. “Not my precinct.”

“You seriously think this guy is gonna stop with the Kitchen? He has his way, the whole of New York could be a hunting ground. All the precincts, everywhere.”

“Yeah, and that’s a cop problem, not a mask problem.” She drops her hand from her gun, though. “Way we see it, this guy wouldn’t have been able to get started if there weren’t people like you running all over the place beating the shit out of criminals instead of letting the cops do their jobs.”

Darcy closes her eyes. “Because the cops have been doing their jobs so well. How many dead boys in a year, Officer? How many people were thrown into holding this year so far for just walking while black? Don’t talk to me about the cops doing their goddamn jobs when half the time we’re trying to help the ones the cops leave behind.”

Brigid clenches her flesh hand up into a fist. She touches her fingers to her radio, and then drops them again. “You have a smart mouth,” she says. “You want to watch yourself, Lilith.”

“You’re saying I’m wrong?”

“I’m saying you need to watch your mouth.”

“Doesn’t mean I’m wrong,” Darcy says. “You know I’m not wrong. You read the statistics, Officer O’Reilly? Last year over twenty-two thousand New Yorkers were stopped by the cops for a stop-and-frisk. You wanna hear the statistics on that one?”

“I can guess.”

“ _Twenty-three thousand,_ ” she says. “You know how many of them were innocent? Over eighteen thousand.  You wanna know how many of them were black? Over twelve-thousand. That’s more than half. We can go back to a few years ago, if you want. Over six-hundred-eighty-thousand stop-and-frisks in 2012, and fifty percent of them were black. Thirty-five were Latino. And that was stop-and-frisks. We can talk about other statistics too. Driving while black. Standing at a bus stop. Wearing a hoodie. Walking down a street while autistic. Existing at all while trans. What about the women who have been raped by a guy wearing a police badge? What about all the people who have been assaulted and brutalized and harassed? What about all the victims brave enough to report a rape who get mocked and have their evidence kits tossed out ten years later without ever being investigated? How many children have been killed because they happened to have the wrong color skin? And you’re asking me to trust the police to do their jobs?”

“Not all cops are like that,” says O’Reilly.

“Yeah, and not all men, and all lives matter. Don’t try to throw the good cops in my face when I go up against half a dozen bad ones every week. Don’t tell me that I should stop what I’m doing and let the cops handle things when half the time it’s the cops who decide to be a bunch of racist pricks and tase a group of Hell’s Kitchen kids just trying to get home at night. And that’s _after_ Fisk’s men were weeded out. These guys aren’t corrupt, they’re just bad, and they’re endemic, and you’re asking me to trust them?”

“None of that means I should trust you to do a damn thing better. You don’t follow the law, you spit on it. You’re disrespecting the uniform as much or more than a dirty cop ever could.”

“Yeah, but at least what I do makes people feel safe at night,” Darcy says. “When people see me coming, they don’t get frightened unless they’ve done something wrong. Can’t say that about any of your so-called _good cops_. I’m not the one disrespecting the uniform, Officer. Cops are.”

O’Reilly taps her fingers against the butt of her gun again. 

“I’ve heard things about you. I’ve heard you’re a good person. You’ve had your name in the papers, Brigid O’Reilly. I know what you did for Kate Bishop and her rape case, all the civil suits that she brought against the police department. Bet it didn’t earn you any favors with the administration. But you did it because you thought it was right, and it _was_ right, and I’m asking you to help me because I don’t have anywhere else to go.” She takes a breath. “Finn Brannigan’s back in town, and he’s looking for the Punisher. I don’t want this guy on the streets any more than the police do, but the Irish are tearing the city apart looking for him, and I don’t have anywhere else to look. They’ve been keeping their noses clean since Fisk and all their old hidey-holes have been blown to shit, so if you can give me something, anything, a name, a place, then I can maybe deal with it before more people get hurt.”

Brigid’s radio crackles. “O’Reilly,” someone says. “What’s your status?”

Darcy stares at Brigid. Brigid stares back. Then, slowly, Brigid hits the comm button on her radio. “Nothing,” she says. “All clear here.” 

“Copy that,” says the dispatch guy, and Darcy pulls her hand away from her baton, trying not to shake. She blows air out through her teeth.

“Could’ve told him I was here.” She flexes her fingers. “I don’t hit cops unless they try to hit me first.”

“Nice to know.” Brigid won’t stop staring.  “If I tell you, then you’ll get him off the streets tonight.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“That’s not good enough.”

“Yes,” Darcy says, and Matt hisses into the comm. “We get him off the streets tonight. And into custody. We don’t kill, O’Reilly.”

“And yet people still somehow wind up dead, hanging around you.” She scuffs her boot over the concrete, pursing her lips. “Just a name?”

“Or an address.”

Silence. Then: “Ah, fuck me,” says Brigid, and _yes._ Her heart skips. _Thank you, Brigid O’Reilly, for being a decent fucking human being_. “And you won’t say a word? I know you talk to that blogger.”

“Nobody’ll know you came into it.” She shrugs. “Like you said. Way out of my zip code.”

“Fuck me,” Brigid says again. “Fine. Nobody I know’s heard that Finn Brannigan’s back in town, but if it’s recent he might not have had time to sink his teeth in yet. His kid Kelly was a little bastard, but he was barely a tenth of what his old man is. If he’s back, there’s going to be a whole lot of bloody bodies showing up on the streets again.”

“That’s heartening.”

Brigid snorts. “Yeah, well, the son of a bitch likes to be brutal. Likes dark places where he can hurt people for a long time and no one can hear them scream.”

“I know lots of places like that in the city.”

“I’ll bet.” Brigid scowls. “Christ, why did I quit smoking with you people around. Didn’t know Finn was back in business, but his kid, the one who died, he was looking into some real estate. Probably using daddy’s money. Don’t know the exact details, but a guy I know over at the 15th told me that the Irish have started scouting out a place by St. Michael’s Cemetery. Thought it was weird, but there wasn’t anything illegal about it, couldn’t serve a warrant. You wanna look for your Irish, you might start there.”

Darcy closes her eyes. “Thank you.”

“Yeah, well.” She crosses her arms over her chest. “Apparently I’m a shit cop.”

“Don’t think this makes you a shit cop,” Darcy says. “Think this makes you a good one.”

“Says the vigilante in the carbon fiber underpants,” Brigid says, and stalks away without a goodbye. When Darcy looks up at the roof again, Matt’s tucked his chin in close to his chest, waiting. She presses her fingers to the comm in her ear.

“That could have gone way worse, you can at least admit that.”

“We need to get to St. Michael’s,” says Matt.

.

.

.

The phone rings.

“This is Finn.”

“You might think about watching your back, Mr. Brannigan.”

“Who is this?”

“A friend.”

“I don’t do business with anyone who won’t tell me their name, man or woman, so whoever you are, I don’t have any—”

“What would you do if I told you that you have two very angry vigilantes bearing down on you, Mr. Brannigan? In that covert catacomb you think you have guarded so well.”

He catches his breath. “Who the bloody hell are you?”

“A friend,” she says again. “Who has a vested interest in ensuring that a potential business partner doesn’t crash and burn in Hell’s Kitchen like so many others have.”

Silence. Then: “I’m listening.”  

“If what I’m hearing is right, then you, Mr. Brannigan, you’ve lost a great deal in the past few days. Half your people. Your son. One-point-two million American dollars.” She curls her necklace around her fingers. “You’ve been waging a war against a one-man army, and at the outset I would think that Daredevil and Lilith have been fighting to find him, too, but consider: you have one vigilante locked up in your catacomb, and another two coming at you at full speed. Their last reported location was maybe six blocks away from St. Michael’s Cemetery. Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s not the first time that your men have gone up against the pair of them and been miserably outmatched, and that’s without your trigger-happy prisoner in the mix. Half your forces have already been decimated, and if you had had time to call in back-up, there’s little guarantee that they would be able to match up.”

She can practically hear him grinding his teeth. “And I suppose you have an offer that’s supposed to save my skin.”

“It has absolutely no guarantee. You have little time to consider a counter-offer, however. If what I’ve heard about the man you have in custody is correct, then I imagine he’s told you little, and spoken less. But I know for a fact he’s been in contact with both Daredevil and Lilith in the past few days, and regardless of whether they mean to damn him or save him, the two of them _will_ smash through your walls of men like children through a sandcastle, and it is very likely that you will suffer when they do. So consider this, Mr. Brannigan. I currently have an asset in play who assures me that she can match them, together or apart. If you wish, I can instruct her to assist you in this and other, further operations you will undertake against the Devil and the Angel of Mercy.”

“Assist how?”

“Making certain that you survive.”

He scoffs. “What makes you think I give a damn about those two?”

“Other than they’re eighty percent of the reason that your family has fallen completely apart over the past year?”

Brannigan makes a noise like the retort of a pistol. “And in return, you’ll get what? Money?”

“Money is unnecessary,” she says. “I would like you to call for more men.”

“What?”

“Men, Mr. Brannigan. Bring in more of your family. Make the Kitchen Irish a force to be reckoned with. I want them everywhere, in everything. I want every man you’ve ever had in that city, behind bars and outside, on alert and ready for whatever may come. And when they’re in place, I want you to do me the favor of wiping Lilith and Daredevil off the map.”

“Yeah?” He scoffs. “And who are you to be asking?”

Vanessa pulls her hair up out of her face, and ties it off. “The last Manfredi worth anything in the world.”

Brannigan goes quiet again. “Maggia?”

“My father was.” She points her toe, and looks at the chipping polish. Her leg aches. “I’m making a bit of a name for myself, independently. I know you and my father did business, Mr. Brannigan, that he did business with your father as well, back when the Irish were in full control of Hell’s Kitchen. I thought this might be a nice way to continue the tradition.”

“Silvio never mentioned to me he had a daughter.”

“He rarely mentioned me at all. Proof I have, but time, we don’t. This offer, Mr. Brannigan, is only good for the next minute and a half. If you choose to accept it, then call me back. If you choose to face whatever is coming to you, then I wish you godspeed.”

She hangs up the phone, sets it on the small table she has settled near the tub, and waits. The bathroom smells like a haunting, like jasmine and warmth and water and old dead secrets. Vanessa sinks down into the water, ignoring the sting over her shoulders. She might, she thinks, be topping her brother for indolent requests. She very much doubts that Joseph had ever had the nerve to call an Irish crime lord while luxuriating in a bubble-bath.

There’s still thirty seconds to the deadline when he calls back. “Send the woman in.”

“Excellent choice, Mr. Brannigan.” Vanessa points her toes. “If we’re to be allies, from now on, I would suggest that you call me Silvia.”

“He gave you his name?”

“He gave me far more than that.” She slips her foot back into the hot water. “I’ll call in an hour to see if you survived.” 

.

.

.

“They’re waiting for us,” he says.

Of course they’re waiting for them. Because when has anything during the Castle investigation ever gone right? When has anything gone right in the past week? Darcy crouches down on the corner of the rooftop, peering down at St. Michael’s Cemetery. The goddamn cemetery’s all the way out in Flushing, which let it be said, is a _pain_ to get to on foot from somewhere near St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Walking, it probably would have taken two hours. At a run? She doesn’t want to think about it. Her chest feels tight and she’s really wishing they could have called a cab without having to worry about whether or not people would remember their faces, their names. They’d grabbed bags of clothes and ran, and now they’re hanging around trying to figure out a plan, and her legs won’t stop buzzing.

Bonus for running for more than an hour, though—she’d spent the whole time too winded to feel weird about how she and Matt are Not Talking. Capitalized Not Talking, because there’s nothing to say, which is _really weird_ and she hates it. Even when they’d been fighting about his mask, they’d at least talked. This is just…silence. And it’s weird, and she doesn’t want to think about it at all. Seriously, cracking heads together sounds like a better idea, at the moment.

“How many?”

“So far?” He tips his head. “Four waiting outside. In the tomb, I don’t know. I count eight heartbeats, but there could be more. It echoes.”

 _You’re echoing,_ he’d said, _from very far away,_ and he hasn’t said anything but she knows his hearing is still bothering him, it has to still be bothering him, things like that don’t just fix themselves. She’s spent half her time on the subway lately googling traumatic brain injuries on her phone, hearing loss and other side effects, everything else, and there’s nothing you can _do_ , with brain injuries, there’s nothing you can really do about it, and with Matt’s senses the way they are there’s no way to tell if the level of damage to his inner ears would have just caused tinnitus in a regular person or if it’s so bad that he might never be able to trust his hearing again, and all she can think is how badly he was shaking when he’d dropped the water glass and how tightly he’d held onto her, like he was completely lost in the dark—

She shakes it off. “’course it echoes. It’s a tomb. Or a catacomb, or whatever. Doesn’t New York City have catacombs?”

“Yes,” Matt says, in a voice that means _I know you’re worried and I don’t appreciate it_ which, fuck him. “Did you not know this?”

“I mean, most older cities have catacombs, I just don’t like thinking that there are dead people under the sidewalk I’m using.”

“Depending on which part of the city you’re in, that’s likely no matter if there are catacombs or not.”

“Thanks for that,” she says, and bites her tongue. _Stop. Don’t. You can’t act like everything’s normal. That’s not fair to either of you._ Darcy clears her throat. “You want top or bottom?”

“Like a bunk bed?”

“I’ll take the ground,” she says, and starts down the fire escape. Matt curses under his breath (she can hear it through the comms, even if he’s two storeys away) and then he’s moving, probably to find some way to climb on top of the mausoleum or the catacomb entrance or the tomb building or whatever it is without the guys with guns noticing him do it. Half the time it seems like Matt Murdock is actually a grown-up Danny Phantom, and she’s willing to take advantage of it if necessary. Darcy draws the baton, and weaves her way between the graves.

There are a number of suspicious looking bro-dudes scattered around the mausoleum, in concentric circles out through the graves. Four, she thinks, just like Matt said. They’re spread out, which makes things a little easier, but at the same time they’re kind of in the worst possible location to sneak up on. There’s no real cover other than the headstones, and those are…well. She doesn’t actually want anyone to shoot at gravestones. Not that the dead people will care all that much, but it’s the principle of the thing, really. _Don’t fire bullets at gravestones. That is how you bring about poltergeists._ She stays out of sight as best she can, darting from one stone to the next in some kind of fucked up game of Red Light, Green Light, until she can snag one guy around the neck with her baton, and drag him down into silence. And miracle of miracles, the bastard has a taser. Wrong size, different weight, and a completely different model from her old one, but it’s a taser and by god, she wants it back. Melvin had been right, when he’d said the baton hadn’t quite matched. Wearing the taser makes her feel even again, completely even, for the first time in days.

The second guy is easier, with the taser. She jabs him in the leg as he goes by, hits the button, and he’s down. (Note to self: most bad guys forget to wear armor around their calves and feet. Like Achilles’s and his heel, only way bonier.) He doesn’t go down quietly, but that doesn’t really matter, because when the other two guys come to check it out, Matt drops from a tree onto one of them, and throws his baton at the other’s head.

“That works,” Darcy says, and kicks one of the guns out of the guy’s hand as she steps over him. “You said eight more downstairs?”

“I think.”

_Let’s hope._

Down, into the dark. The stairwell is almost pitch black, aside from a dim light at the bottom. This place feels more like a playground based off of a catacomb than a real one, something smooth and nicely curved and distinctly lacking skulls in the walls. Still, the stairwell is thin, and Matt goes first, so she takes the stairs in tight circles, watching his back half the time. He seems so much bigger in the uniform, especially in the dark. His shoulders are broader. Looking at him from behind she can almost pretend she doesn’t really recognize him, even after months and months. It’s no wonder, she thinks, that Brett doesn’t remember his voice, that Ben still hasn’t quite put it together. If she can’t recognize him sometimes, then other people, people who don’t know him as well, they wouldn’t even begin to guess.

“Nine,” he says, when they’re close to the bottom of the stairs. “Castle’s here. Four doors down and to the left.”

She can hear screaming, so yeah, she’d figured. The Irish probably haven’t taken kindly to Frank Castle blowing up everything near and dear to them, the past few weeks. Darcy waits until the silence stretches thin, and then says, “We want to get him out of here?”

“Seems like a good idea.”

Cops will be on their way, probably. Maybe. She’s not sure. “You want left?”

He nods. She thinks he might be biting back something, some order, but when they reach the last curve, he turns, and looks back at her. Matt presses his lips together. He lifts his hand, like he’s going to reach out. Then he stops, halfway there, suspended in space like he’s hit some kind of barrier between him and her, some shield that keeps him from actually daring to touch her. She bites the inside of her lip, and just looks at him, at the reflective plastic over his eyes, bloody red. He’s had a few days of rest, but he’s still not a hundred percent, and TBIs don’t just…go away. They don’t just fix themselves after a couple of days of nothing. He probably shouldn’t even be standing right now, not really, but they’re both here, and there’s not much she can do about it now, and she’d promised and he’d promised, and she wants so badly to trust it, but—who knows. 

Matt’s still watching her. Darcy swallows. “What?”

He shakes his head. His fingers fall away. “Nothing,” he says. “I’ll take left.”

She nods. Six heartbeats after he slips out into the dark—she counts, carefully, letting the noise swallow her up—she sidles out of the stairwell and into the right-hand passage.

The catacomb/mausoleum/tomb/basement/whatever they should be calling it is actually a Brannigan tomb. There are names here from the eighteen hundreds, earlier. Irish immigrants, pre-potato famine. _Old, old family_. It’s dirtier, down the side passages, like nobody’s been here in years. ( _Clang,_ and the echo of Matt’s baton reverberates through her ribs as he stalks from one passage to the next, drawing them in. She waits until someone passes in front of her hidey-hole, and then drives the taser into his back, covering his mouth with her free hand to muffle the yelp.) It’s old, and dirty, and the walls are crumbling towards the back. She doesn’t trust a single thing about this place. There could be hidden doors, or something. Hidden passages. _Oh my god, wait, if there are hidden passages that would be really cool, actually_ — _focus_. The screams keep echoing. There’s something about it that’s making her skin crawl. For obvious reasons, first of all, because Jesus, there’s a dull, drilling whine and someone is screaming and it’s like all her worst nightmares about the dentist’s office have mated with the worst kind of vampire movie and it’s _awful_ , seriously. (Matt’s vanished into the dark. Darcy slips out of her tunnel, and gives the nearest passing guard a love tap before crossing the passage and disappearing again.) The thing about this, though, this kind of screaming—this isn’t just pain, and it definitely isn’t fear. She knows what frightened screaming sounds like, and this is more—well. This is a scream of, pain, yes, but it’s also—it’s like when you’re in a hard fight and you need to shout just because you’re full of it, the movement, the sound, the energy and the frustration or the satisfaction of finally landing a useful hit. Castle isn’t screaming because he’s scared, he’s screaming just to _scream,_ like he doesn’t get the chance normally and he’s using whatever Finn is doing to him to howl like an animal for as long as he can. It’s unsettling.   

There’s a footstep at the head of her tunnel. At the same time, she hears it, the pinging of Matt’s baton ricocheting off a wall and landing hard. Apparently that’s the cue. She bolts out from her hiding place, extending the baton. Five men, and two are already down, and when she snaps the baton out and cracks it across the nearest man’s jaw a gun goes off and turns the tunnel into an echo chamber. They’re slow, the Irish. It’s nothing like fighting Miss Ninja, and definitely nothing like fighting Frank Castle. _How the hell did they take him?_ She skips sideways out of the way of a fist, and rams the baton up into the soft parts in the guy’s guts. _He kills dozens of people at a time, how the hell did a handful of angry Irish gangsters manage to drag him all the way out to Flushing unless he wants to be here?_

Now, that’s a terrifying thought.

“Down,” Daredevil says, and she drops. It’s months and months of instinct, not an order but a warning and a habit and a reality, and if it means not getting a knife in the back of her neck then she’s totally okay with falling flat on her face. Black fabric and dark hair and a mask and _what the fuck,_ what the actual fuck is Miss Ninja doing here, where did she come from, what the _fuck_ —

“You’re _Irish_?” Darcy says, and rolls back out of the way when the woman flips her knife, and catches it. “You kidding me right now?”

Miss Ninja darts a look at Matt, and then looks back to Darcy. “I’m whoever they want me to be,” she says, and then she’s passed the knife to her left hand and lunged. _Shit_. She’s faster this time, somehow. Back and forth, and the knife clips and rebounds off of one of Darcy’s armored plates as down the hall, another one of the Irish shouts “ _Oi_!” like they’re in a JK Rowling novel.

“Go,” Darcy snaps, and Matt snaps to, vanishing down the hall to deal with the angry Irishmen with guns. _There are Seamus Finnigan and Tom Branson jokes to be made here and I don’t have the brain for it._ Miss Ninja darts back and watches him vanish, eyes flicking between Lilith and Daredevil.

“That one didn’t strike me as the type to follow orders.” Her eyes cut from Darcy’s head to her toes. “Neither did you.”

“Of course I get the chatty one.”

Miss Ninja passes her knife back and forth between her hands. It’s brighter here, or brighter than the rooftop at the ambush site, and this time Darcy can make out a little more, the angle of her eyes and the general shape of her nose where it’s hidden beneath the mask. She has a long slashing scar down the inside of her upper left arm, knotted flesh that angles sharply to the right by her elbow. There’s another mark on the skin of her shoulder, a birthmark or a tiny faded tattoo maybe, Darcy’s not sure. She doesn’t get the chance to look before Miss Ninja’s lunged again, and she’s trying not to get stabbed in the throat. She’s faster this time, and it’s not Darcy’s imagination; she’s moving faster and she’s hitting harder and she’s keeping up, she’s mirroring everything Darcy’s doing and smacking her hands aside before she can land a blow, and it’s _infuriating._ The blade of the knife screeches against the baton again, and Miss Ninja’s eyes crinkle.

“If you want to shout for help,” she says, “I won’t think any less of you.”

“Yeah, fuck you,” Darcy snaps, and lunges with her taser. Electricity crackles. The prongs skid over Miss Ninja’s side, and Darcy can’t tell if it’s an accident or not, but Miss Ninja jolts and jerks and snaps away from her again, making a noise like a screechy cat. (Castle’s stopped screaming. That shouldn’t be as odd as it is. She hears Matt’s batons again, hears a shout, and then silence.) She’s staggering, but she hasn’t gone down, and Miss Ninja snaps around and the heel of her shoe clips Darcy hard enough to make her eyes cross. “ _Jimmy_ ,” someone shouts, “ _Shaun, goddamn you, woman, get in here—_ ” and Miss Ninja doesn’t move; she twirls her knife, watches Darcy. Darcy spits.

“Your boss sounds like he needs help.”

Miss Ninja’s eyes go wide. There’s a rim of gold around the brown, flickering. Then she’s gone, and Darcy whacks her baton hard against the ground before heaving herself to her feet, and following. _Yeah, sure, Darcy, tell the woman that the mob boss is calling for her, that’s an excellent idea, just—Jesus—_

“Lilith,” Matt says in her ear, and she snaps, “I’m on my way, don’t—”

More men. Out of nowhere. Five more, and all of them with guns. “Get to Castle,” Darcy says, and how the fuck did Matt not pick up these ones, where did they come from, are there _seriously_ secret passages in here and she’s so fucking done with seeing blondes and redheads and all these ridiculous Irish faces and hearing the botched accents and _all of it._ She’s pissed as hell and her mouth hurts and one of them gives her a top to toe look before cocking an eyebrow.

“You lost, sweetheart?”

“Darlin’, don’t even,” she says, and snaps his kneecap. Down the hall, a shotgun goes off. Drop again, spin, knock his feet out from under him, snap up and spin again and there’s another one down, there’s blood on her face and she’s not sure whose it is, the shotgun goes off, “ _Jimmy_ , _Shaun_ ,” and then a door’s shattered and that’s Matt and Miss Ninja falling out of it, tangling, and what the fuck is even going on here, this is a free-for-all underneath the earth in a freaking cemetery and _this_ is what her life is now, apparently. (Something hits her hard in the shoulder and skids and she only realizes someone tried to stab her with a flick knife when she knocks it out of the guy’s hand, and _thank you, Melvin, thank you, thank you_ —) Last one, down, and out of the corner of her eye she can see two men dragging a third out between them, smearing blood over the floor. Miss Ninja is covering their escape. There’s another raw, wounded sound, like an animal, but more men are coming up out of nowhere, heaps of them, and Castle’s sagging in the door frame with blood running down his head.

“Y’all are rude, seriously, don’t you _lie down_ —”

“Get out of the way,” Castle shouts, and there’s a shotgun in his hands, and somehow she’s standing between him and his target again and this time she’s not entirely sure she shouldn’t just budge over and let him do it. A hammer whirls out of the room he came from, knocks the shotgun sideways, and when it goes off another Irishman howls and hits the floor. When she looks back around, Brannigan’s gone, and Miss Ninja is standing by the doors, her knife out, pacing back and forth like a caged tiger. Why she hasn’t followed, Darcy has no idea, but now it’s Castle and her, and seven men all around, and _Christ._ Beggars can’t be choosers.

It’s deeply, intrinsically weird to be fighting with him, not against him. He looks like one of the walking dead, barely standing, the knee she’s smashed giving out and blood smearing over the concrete and more of it running down his chest and his face, dripping from his fingers. When he goes to shoot the last one, Darcy taps the gun out of his hand with her baton, and the blow nearly makes him fall over. She’s under his arm and wrapped around his waist before she realizes it, before she thinks. _Like fuck are you walking out of this one, Jarhead._ For a second she thinks he’ll wrap an arm around her neck and strangle her, but he just rocks back and forth on his feet, and then dumps most of his weight on her. Darcy staggers to the side, and swears.

“Coward,” he says, and spits out a tooth. _Gross._ “Both of you, fuckin’ cowards.”

“Laugh it up, fuzzball, the cowards came to save your stupid ass.” She clears her throat. “I’m taking him out.”

“You’re clear out the stairs,” Matt says from the doorframe of the torture chamber. He kicks his baton back up into his hand. “I’ll deal with Brannigan.”

“Brannigan’s mine,” says Castle, but they both ignore him. When he tries to yank away from her, he barely has enough strength to tip to the side. Darcy drags his arm over her shoulders, and wishes she were taller.

“Watch it, Lady Ninja has a knife.”

Matt surges past them down the hall without another word. .   

“Brannigan’s _mine_ ,” Castle spits again, but when he tries to lunge away from her they nearly tip into the wall again. _A reason,_ Darcy thinks, _Karen thinks there has to be a reason,_ and the way Castle’s acting, just— _God, why do I have to think so much about the grey?_ “Both of you, fuckin’ Jesus—

“Shut up,” Darcy says, and steps away from him so he lands hard on the floor. She catches his jaw in her hand, forces him to look at her. “ _Look_ at me, asshole. We did not come all the way out here at ass o’clock at night to let you have your way and keep killing people.”

“That son of a bitch—”

“—is probably gone by now, and you’re in no state to go after him anyway, you’d get chewed up and spit out by the rest of his men like a fucking Easter bunny— _hey_!” She digs her fingers hard into his jaw, into the cut on his face, until it stings. “ _Listen_ to me, asshole. Listen—Castle, listen to me. You have two choices here. I don’t think you want to die, and if you go after them, you’re going to, so either you cooperate, and you walk up those goddamn stairs with me and the dog and get some goddamn help for that stupid face of yours, or I tase you, tie you up, and send the cops in to grab you so you can wake up in the hospital in handcuffs. Up to you. But I swear to God if you keep on fighting me, I _will_ break your jaw this time, and I will enjoy it way, way too much.”

Castle blinks at her. Dark eyes, black ice eyes, and he blinks at her like she’s surprised him, somehow. He stops moving, watching her. Darcy lets go of him, and wipes her bloody glove on her pants. “Get up,” she snaps, and when she offers him her hand he seizes it, and heaves himself to his feet. “You talk again, I’m gonna give up and leave you to the crazy lady in the mask. She saved Brannigan for a reason, she probably wants you dead too.”

Castle rasps something that could be a laugh. “Still spitty as hell, Cat. Hell you doing, dragging me out after what I did?”

“Fuck off, Jarhead.” She grinds her teeth. “You remind me, I’m dropping your ass.”

“Stupid move, ‘sall I’m saying.”

“Again with me getting the chatty ones.”

“Dog,” he says. For a second, she thinks he’s crazy. Then she hears it, the whining. Something’s scraping at the wooden door on the far side of the torture chamber. (And it _is_ a torture room, Christ, a bloody drill and razors and knives and nails and what the fuck kind of twisted _Home Improvement_ bullshit was going on in here, Christ, Christ—) And yeah, as much as she hates to hear it from him, she really, really wants to bare her teeth and hiss like a cat right now, because _we don’t have time for this, damn it._ “Leave the dog here, they’ll shoot it.”

“Goddammit.” Outside, she hears one of Matt’s batons rebound off the wall. “ _Shit._ Why’d they bring him here?”

“Him?” says Castle. “That dog’s a bitch.”

She has to drag his arm all the way around her neck again before she can fumble the door open. The dog, Ripper, whatever her name is, lunges out and circles their feet, making noises like a kicked puppy. She’s going to get in the way, Darcy thinks, until Castle whistles between his teeth and she settles again. “What’s she doing here?”

Castle doesn’t say anything. Judging by the number of holes in him right now, she can guess. Darcy looks down at the dog, who’s limping just like Castle is, and regrets not smashing Finn Brannigan’s head in with a hammer before his men had managed to drag him out of the catacombs. “Come on.”

“Nowhere else to go, Cat,” says Castle.

“I was talking to the dog.”

She really doesn’t want to think that the cracking noise Castle makes then is a laugh. If he laughs he’s human. But he looks desperately, unassailably human right now, broken and bleeding, bruised and torn to shreds, holes in his shoes and in his pants and in his foot and in his leg and a tear in his shirt that shows off the cuts she’d left behind, two over his ribs. The crease from the bullet buzzes along her side. Darcy yanks his arm again, hard, and heaves him to the door.

It’s nearly impossible to get Castle up the stairs. He falls twice, almost drags her back down with him. His foot’s fucked up, she thinks, same as his knee, and Ripper the dog isn’t doing much to help, pacing back and forth in front of them and turning back to watch. The fact that the dog is being so goddamn loyal isn’t helping her heart much either. They barely make it a few dozen feet away from the mausoleum before he staggers, and hits the ground. He doesn’t get up again. “Come on.” Darcy crouches down next to him. “Not giving up on me now, are you, Castle?”

Castle cracks again, and shifts, lying flat on his back on the grass. “That not what you want?”

“You’re seriously an asshole.” She kind of wants to kick him in the ribs. Darcy glances back at the door to the tomb, and curses under her breath. She can still hear Matt, fighting, down below.

“Go help him,” Castle says. “Not much you can do here.”

“I can keep you from running.”

“Not running anywhere, I don’t think.”

“Not even after Brannigan?”

“You fucked my knee, not much running I can do.”

He’s staring at the moon. The light’s casting odd gleaming reflections in the blood on his cheeks, cuts and bruises black in the dark. There’s a gash on his arm that’s still bleeding, torn gauze. “Jesus. You’re a fucking wreck, Frank.”

“’s Frank now?”

She straightens. The cops will be here soon, judging by the lights. _Brigid,_ she thinks. Brigid would have called them. She’s good at helping, but she wouldn’t be able to keep her nose out of it, Brigid. Well. At least the mausoleum’s about as far from the main gates as you can get, and it’ll take them a while to make out the shadows of Darcy and Frank Castle in the far corner of the cemetery. They can probably still get out through the back way, if the NYPD is as good at their job as they are regularly. Which is to say, not very, in her opinion. “We’ve both tried to kill each other and I still just dragged your stupid ass up out of the earth, I feel like I out of everyone on the fucking planet get to call you Frank without all this backchat.”

“Spitty cat,” he says, and actually smiles, crooked and broken and awful, lips peeling back from bloody teeth. “Told you, never did like cats.”

Ripper the pit bull has picked a spot, she thinks, between them and the door of the mausoleum. She paces back and forth. Darcy watches her for a bit, oddly hypnotized. “What’d you do to make that dog like you so much?”

Frank doesn’t say anything.

“Fine. Be a statue.” She drops down onto the ground, leaning back against a headstone. She gets the feeling that _Mary Ellis Phipps, 1832-1856, Over And Under And Over Again_ won’t mind too much. “So goddamn chatty when no one looks you in the face, but with real people you get all tongue-tied. Were you one of those kids who never talked to anyone in school?”

Frank cracks again. “Something’s wrong with you.”

“Yeah, same thing that’s wrong with you, I don’t know when to keep my damn nose clean.” She rests her arms on her knees. Matt’s still fighting. “I can’t drag you anywhere, Frank, you’re too heavy. If you don’t work with me, I can’t get you out.”

“Thought you wanted me dead for everything I’ve done, Cat.”

Darcy watches him through her lashes. “And I thought you were gonna shoot me in the head but here’s me, being the bigger person. Try it sometime.”

“Wasn’t gonna.”

“What?”

When he coughs, blood bubbles on his lips. “No bullet in the gun.”

Darcy opens her mouth, and closes it again. She wants to laugh. Or cry. Or punch him in the face. Possibly all three. “There was no bullet in the gun.”

“Think you’re both cowards,” he says. “But. Not gonna kill you. Not gonna kill either of you. Don’t deserve it. You’re wrong, but you’re trying.”

“So what the hell was that, some—some kind of _show_?”

He spits. “Red’s too stubborn. Wouldn’t’ve understood otherwise.”

“Jesus Christ,” Darcy says again. “You sick son of a bitch.”

“’swhat they tell me.”

“I should’ve killed you.”

“Probably.”

She sticks on that, the _probably._ She doesn’t think Frank Castle wants to die, but at the same time, it’s just…she sticks on it. _Probably._ Darcy deflates, watching him. “Daredevil know it was fake yet?”

“You still have that fancy audio set up in your headgear? ‘cause now he does.”

She’s not sure he’s paying attention, at the moment. _If there was no bullet in the gun, then_ —but no, Matt’s hearing is still shot. Or not shot, but compromised. And if he’d been hit in the head again, who knows what he would or wouldn’t have noticed?

“A fucking test.” She knocks her head to the stone. “Jesus Christ.”

“Red passed,” says Frank. “Didn’t need to test you, you already passed.”

“A fucking test.” _God, I’m tired._ “Something’s really fucking wrong with you, Jarhead.”

“Why’re you calling me that?”

“Why are you calling me Cat?”

Frank heaves a little. Then he grits his teeth, and rolls. Darcy’s halfway up off the grass by the time he’s managed to sit up, prop himself against a headstone of his own. His reads _Marcus Dettweiler, 1921-1953, When Do The Dead Stay Dead._ There’s not really much she can do about it now. She sinks back down. “You look like shit, man,” she says. “The hell were you doing letting the Brannigans grab you like that?”

“What I needed to do to find that fucking bastard.”

“What, Finn Brannigan?”

“Fucking bastard,” says Frank.

“I mean, the initials match, so sure. What’d he do?”

He coughs. Ripper creeps closer, and when Frank offers a hand, she nudges her heavy pit bull head up underneath his bloody fingers.

“Knew a dog,” he says, after a moment. “Had dogs when I was a kid. Always liked me.”

“So you were the kid who never talked to anyone and could always be found in the backyard at house parties playing with the family dog.”

Frank tugs on Ripper’s ear. “This one’s young. Not too set yet. Probably barely wet her teeth in fighting. Not marked up too badly, hasn’t killed either. Won’t ever be a dog you can keep around other dogs, but she’s not wild.” He considers. “Didn’t see any point leaving her there.”

“So, what, the Punisher and his shotgun and his trusty pit bull?”

“Nah. Cops would’ve put her down.” He shuts his eyes. “Besides. It’s not much of a life. Killing other dogs ‘cause some bastard thinks it’s a fun game.”

“Not much of a life for humans, either.”

Frank turns his face away from her to look at the moon again. Ripper dusts her tail over the grass, and when Darcy reaches out one hand, she pushes her head into Darcy’s glove. “Hey, baby,” Darcy says again, and Ripper doesn’t lick, but her tongue rolls out of her mouth. “Hey, there.”

“Thought you didn’t like dogs.”

“So far this one hasn’t tried to bite me and she hasn’t wiped her spit all over my face. We’ve come to an accord.” She tugs a little on Ripper’s good ear. (Christ, Ripper. This dog isn’t a ripper. This dog is a victim just like everyone else.) “If you want, I’ll make sure she gets somewhere safe.”

He looks at the dog. Ripper settles, curled, her spine nudging into Darcy’s hip. Frank shuts his eyes. He doesn’t say please, but she’s not sure he has to.

“No birds, tonight?” says Frank. Darcy shakes her head.

“Didn’t think we’d need her, this time.”

“Makes Red the last man out,” he says, in an odd voice.

“Yeah, last man out, usually.”

“Coming up,” Matt says in her ear. “She ran. I think she went after Brannigan.”

“That’s all we need.” Darcy looks around at the line of cop cars. “Might want to hurry,” she says. “The good sergeant’s getting a little anxious.”

“Brett?”

“Probably.” She sighs. “Looks like someone called in a tip. Might have been Brigid. Might have even been the Brannigans. You have a little time, he’s arguing with the caretaker at the gate.”

“That Red?” says Frank, and if she didn’t know better she’d say he’s actually curious. Darcy shifts on the ground. The grass is wet, and even through the armor she’s going to have damp underwear now.

“What’s with the nicknames, Frank? That a Marine thing?”

He shrugs. “Feel kinda stupid saying _Daredevil_ all the time.”

She can’t help it. She snorts. “You have no idea.”

The look on his face is…very unsettlingly close to shrewd, and she doesn’t like it. “He piss you off?”

“We’re not having a heart-to-heart, Frank.”

“Yeah, sure.” Frank closes his eyes again. “Not as much of a pussy as I figured, Red.”

“You say that word again and I’ll be the one beating your head in with a tire iron,” says Darcy, icy. “Maybe before all you big strong macho guys start going off on how fragile vaginas are you might wanna think about how you, you know, came from one.”

Frank cracks an eye, and looks at her. The crooked, broken smile comes back. “Christ, you’re a piece of work, aren’t you, Cat?”

She drags her gloved fingers down Ripper’s ribs, careful to avoid the scabs. “You just worked that out now? Thought you were smart.”

“Asked him if he knew how lucky he was.” He coughs. It sounds wet. “Shit. Y’know, I asked Red if he knew how damn lucky he was, having someone who’d walk into the firing line to get him back. Used to wonder why he let you do this, y’know. Risk losing it.”

“The Devil doesn’t let me do anything.”

“Lilith,” says Frank, carefully. “I figured.”

She tears up a few blades of grass.

“You ever been tired, Cat?” Frank heaves again, and blood dribbles over his lip. “You ever—you ever been so goddamn tired you can’t even manage breathing?”

Darcy shakes her head. “Not yet.”

“Yeah, well. Keep going the way you are, wouldn’t be surprised if you get it soon.”

_Neither would I._

“Wasn’t gonna kill you,” he says again, through the blood. “Don’t think you’ll believe me, but I wouldn’t have killed you. Didn’t want him dead, either. Just—” He stops. “Tried to tell you that. Didn’t think you wouldn’t be able to hear me.”

“I should have broken your jaw back on that rooftop so I didn’t have to get all this context.” She shuts her eyes. “Easier to just hate you.”

“Yeah, well,” Frank says. “You nearly did.”

“Hope it hurts,” says Darcy sweetly. Frank peers at her again through wet eyelashes.

“He’s under your skin, isn’t he?” He tips his head. “Pair of you. Weaseled your way under his skin like he’s under yours. Makes you raw, doing that. Feels like you bleed, when they get cut. Makes you weaker than anything and it scares the shit out of you but you don’t want to stop.”

The only reason she sees Matt leave the tomb is because Ripper lifts her good ear. He’s slinking through the graves, sticking to the shadows. Darcy swallows, hard. There’s an odd, metronomic quality to Frank’s voice that makes her think of church bells. “Sounds like you’re speaking from experience.”

Matt’s getting closer, but he’s still a dozen feet off when Frank coughs. “Someone gets under your skin, Cat, ‘snot about experience. More like you’re trying to survive it. You—you lose it, you lose them, and it’s like all the thorns they pierced you with are yanked out at once. Rips you up. Tears you to shreds. And—and you figure out, when all the thorns are gone, that—that those thorns, things that hooked in and stung and ached and you just—you wanted to tear them out yourself, sometimes, but you figure out when they’re gone that they might’ve been the only thing keeping you together at all.”

“Never figured you for a poet, Frank,” says Darcy. Matt crouches down beside them, turning his face from Darcy to Frank. Blood’s leaking from his lip. “People’d probably pay money to read that, y’know.”

“Bullshit.”

“No, it’s good.” She scratches Ripper’s side again. “Better than anything I could come up with.”

He makes that wet choking sound again. She wonders if one of his broken ribs has dug into his lung. “Pair of you are fucking stupid,” he says. “You have thorns like that, you have a thing like that in your life, you don’t risk it with this bullshit. Go out like this, every night, you’re asking to lose everything. You’re asking to have someone rip you apart. Practically begging for it. Fucking stupid, the both of you.”

Matt hums, low in his throat. “Someone told me last year you risk that no matter what, Frank,” he says, very quietly. Darcy’s heart surges under her ribs. “Caring at all’s a risk. Doesn’t matter if Halloween costumes come into it.”

“People die a million different ways every day,” Darcy says. “This way I can at least try to make sure he doesn’t get his dumb ass shot again.”

Matt’s mouth twists into something that could be a smile, albeit a bitter one. He doesn’t say anything. Frank looks from him to Darcy and back, and then says, “Fucking stupid.” He shuts his eyes. “Both of you are fucking stupid.”

“Guilty as charged,” says Darcy. “Unfortunately.”

They’re all quiet, for a minute.

“What’s that poem?” Matt says. “The one you were saying down in the catacomb. What’s that poem you were saying?”

“Poem?”

“Yeah.” He clears his throat. “One batch, two batch. Said it before you tried to pull the trigger on Finn Brannigan. What’s it mean?”

“You heard that?”

“Yeah.”

“Christ,” Frank says. “Sometimes I think maybe you _are_ the devil.”

Matt’s mouth contorts. “Sometimes,” he says, “I think maybe I am, too.”

Darcy can’t help it. She reaches out, touches her fingers to his elbow. Matt doesn’t shake her off. He turns his head towards her, and when she presses her fingers to the center of his palm, he fists his hand around them, for a heartbeat, two, gloves scuffing over each other like sandpaper. Then he lets go. Frank’s quiet for a long time, watching them, his eyes half-lidded and musing. The dog lifts her head and looks at nothing, ears pricked, peering off into the dark of the cemetery.

“It was her favorite book,” Frank says.

.

.

.

They get out clean. Somehow, incredibly, they get out clean. She’s already fifty feet away with the dog when Matt and Brett have their talk, when Brett scoffs under his breath and turns and lets Matt go in spite of everything. Ripper—she has to come up with a new name for this damn dog, but she can’t think of anything at the moment other than _Dog,_ which is pathetic—doesn’t really want to come with her, but she obeys, and she’s practically vibrating with every step they take away from Frank. Which. He’s apparently Frank in her head, now, not Castle and not Jarhead and not anything else. Frank, who’d watched his family die. Frank who hadn’t even come near killing her when she’d thought Matt was dead, even when she’d tried to cut him open.

She doesn’t know how to feel anymore. 

Matt catches up with her a few blocks away. They’re still in Flushing, and walking back to Hell’s Kitchen, especially with a dog, is going to be impossible. Her feet hurt, and her heart hurts, and she just wants to curl up and go to sleep, but she can’t, not yet, not really. She swallows back her lungs. “You wanna tell me how nine guys turned into like thirty without you realizing?”

His mouth creases, hard. “Hearing’s not right yet,” he says, after a moment, and her heart pinches in her chest. “Underground is harder. All echoes.”

 _And that’s without a TBI._ She chews the inside of her cheek. “Well, it was fun, anyway.”

“I think your definition of fun has turned a little twisted, lately.” He looks down at Ripper, and his mouth curves the way it does when he’s arching his eyebrows at her. “That one yours now?”

“No.” Darcy touches her hand to Ripper’s back. “But—I don’t know. For tonight, maybe. Until I find somewhere to put her.”

Matt’s quiet for a second. “Claire likes dogs.”

“Claire’s a nurse who works hell shifts, I don’t know if she can take a dog.” There’s a shed just beyond one of the fences, rope hanging on the outside of the door. Darcy heaves herself up and over, and steals the rope, climbing back to loop it through the collar. “Just for tonight. I don’t know. I’ll figure something out, all right?”

Matt shifts on his feet. When he peels his gloves back, crouches down, Ripper shies a little. Still, she doesn’t bite when he puts his hand out, and she doesn’t shake when he touches her ear.

“I can help,” he says, not looking at her. “If you want.”

It’s such a thin line they’re treading. Darcy watches his helmet, the curve of the horns, the flicker of his fingers over Ripper’s fur. _Christ. If I can’t talk to him and I can’t work with him and I can’t at least be around him then I’m going to go insane._ She can fight with him, and alongside him, but the rest of it—God. Why does it have to be so hard?

When he lifts his head, she stares hard at the line of the fence, and clears her throat. “Yeah.” She shouldn’t sound hoarse, Jesus. “I mean, if you want to.”

He doesn’t reach out this time, but the weight of his focus is prickling down the back of her neck. Darcy pulls at the rope. “We should start walking.”

Matt stands, and lets her pass.

They’d left the bags with their clothes behind a dumpster a good six blocks away from the cemetery, one of the only alleyways in the area that has a little curve to protect anyone inside it from being seen on the street. This is a process she’s used to, now, stripping out of her uniform and stowing it in a duffel, hiding away her second skin and trying to shift back into what people expect when they hear the name Darcy Lewis. Her skinny jeans tug at a bruise she can’t remember getting, and when she pulls on the button-down over the tank she realizes she’d snagged one of the shirts she’d stolen from Matt ages ago. The sleeves are too long, and she has to roll them up. If he’s noticed, he doesn’t say anything, just snaps out his cane and grips her elbow when she turns and offers it to him. It’s a two hour walk, she thinks, more, and about ten minutes into it Matt lifts his face and says, “It’s going to rain.”

“Of course it is.” Darcy makes a face. “Nothing goes right this week. Why wouldn’t it rain when we can’t afford a cab?”

“We could call someone.”

“No. That thing about catching colds from walking in rain is a myth, I think. Besides.” She shrugs. “It’ll clean the blood off.” 

Matt presses his fingers hard into her elbow. Then he loosens his grip, slowly. “You sure?”

“I want to walk.”

He nods, and tugs at her arm. “This way.”

It starts in a few sprinkles, at first. When they cross back into Manhattan, it’s a steady drizzle, flattening her hair down and sprinkling her clothes with dark splotches. Ripper—Dog—whatever the dog’s name is now doesn’t make a sound, padding along at Darcy’s hip. She keeps turning to look back, like she’s waiting for someone. Then thunder cracks, and it’s a downpour. In the duffel bags, the uniforms are dry, but she’s soaked, her hair, her clothes, all the way through to her underwear. The only dry thing about her at the moment is her socks, and she’s pretty sure those are next.

Matt’s silent for the first hour, careful to keep from knocking into her, tapping his cane back and forth on the sidewalk with the steady rhythm of a heartbeat. She hasn’t seen him this soaked since he’d walked from St. Patrick’s to Jen’s. Even her arteries ache, thinking of that. She looks at the ground for a few blocks, clears her throat. She used to like silences, with Matt, and now—no. They’re excruciating.

“You’re grinding your teeth,” he says, soft enough that she thinks she’s imagining it. “What’s wrong?”

She doesn’t say anything for a while. She has to think of something that doesn’t sound pathetic. “Frank.” Darcy weaves the rope between her fingers. “Only—Brannigan’s still alive. If Frank gets out, he’ll go after the guy again.”

“Brannigan’s one of the men who killed his family.” Matt presses his lips together. “Don’t blame him, much.”

Darcy snaps a look at him. “That’s a change of heart. You don’t blame him for wanting to kill someone?”

“Should I?” He keeps his face carefully blank, hiding away behind his glasses. “After what happened on the rooftop?”

 _Me or her._ The gun going off, the bullet chipping brick. He’d meant it. He’d aimed. Frank’s alive tonight because he’d ducked, because he’d pushed Darcy out of the way. “His gun was empty.”

“I heard.”

She bites her lip, and goes back to staring at the ground.

“I could have killed you,” Matt says. “Doing that.”

“You were aiming for Frank.”

“Yeah, and his gun was empty, and I would’ve known that if—” He stops. “I could have killed you and I meant to kill him.”

“You’re talking to me,” Darcy says. “I told you what happened, after you were shot. If you’re wanting someone to punish you, then you should look somewhere else, because I’m not gonna do it. Not for doing the same thing I did. And unlike you, I don’t regret doing it. I thought you were dead, and I tried to kill him, and that’s wrong, but I don’t—” She stops. “I don’t know when the world turned so black and white for you, considering everything we do, but I don’t regret what I did. It makes me sick, but I don’t—it didn’t feel wrong, and it doesn’t feel wrong now. Maybe that makes me the same as Frank Castle, I don’t know.”

“You’re not the same,” he says. “You could have killed him, and you didn’t.”

“Yeah, because he stopped me the first time. And the second time…I don’t know. Even after I knew you were alive, doesn’t mean I didn’t want to try again.”

His fingers curl close into her arm. Matt goes quiet.

They’ve walked another three blocks by the time he clears his throat. The rain isn’t even close to letting up, and the gutters are running dark. “I don’t.”

Darcy blinks at him. “Don’t what?”

“Regret it,” he says. “Trying—I don’t regret pulling the trigger. I thought he was going to kill you, and I—I should regret it. I feel guilty for not regretting it, but I don’t. I don’t regret trying to kill him, not if it meant saving your life. He put a gun in my hand and all I could think about, before you found us, was what I did when—when Nobu had you. With Nobu and Fisk and everything else. What—what I did. What I was willing to do to get you back, it all just—” He stops, and wets his lips. “I would probably do anything, if it meant saving your life.”

Barbed wire cuts in around her throat. Darcy opens her mouth, and closes it again. “Oh,” she says, very quietly. Matt curls his fingers into her elbow again.

“He said something,” he says. “Frank. About—about how similar we were. _One bad day,_ was what he said. I’m one bad day from turning into him. I didn’t want to believe it, when he said that, I didn’t want to remember it, but it’s—he’s not wrong.” He licks his lips again, and says, “I think, if you died, that—that would be my bad day.”

She watches the pavement for a few more steps. Then, carefully, she shifts her arm, and threads her fingers into his. It’s not forgiveness, not even close, but just—she can’t not touch him, right now. She can’t not do this. Matt goes ragged, his breath catching. It takes him a little bit before he presses his fingers into her hand, holding on, drawing his thumb back and forth over her damp skin.

The rain’s coming down harder, now, a full, heavy roar, steady as a monsoon. Neither of them have umbrellas. The dog doesn’t seem to care about the weather. A few cabs pass, but nobody stops for them. Darcy doesn’t try to hail one. She keeps one hand wrapped around the makeshift leash, and the other tangled in Matt’s, and he taps his cane in a steady rhythm and steps carefully, not because he can’t keep his balance but because—and this is just her theory, but her theories about Matt are usually right—he’s listening to the rain. (“It’s constant motion,” he’d said. “It’s—it’s blue instead of red, it traces things out and makes them clearer and fogs them away again all at once. It’s—I don’t know. It’s rain.”)

They pass the office. Another taxi blares by. Somewhere nearby a door slams, and it makes her jump. Matt squeezes her fingers, and when she gives him a look out of the corner of her eye, he shakes his head. “Delivery,” he says, very quietly. “Didn’t get a tip.”

“Rude.”

His lips twitch, and then turn back down. She can’t stop thinking about thorns.

The office. A few blocks of lights and sounds and people staring at them through windows as they walk silent in the rain. Then, finally, home, two and a half hours later, a shivery dog at her leg (because the dog’s shivering now, cold, and she seems to have forgotten the whole _don’t touch_ thing in favor of pressing into Darcy’s warmth) and Matt’s hand still in hers. He clears his throat, and draws away, ghosting his fingertips against the back of her hand.

“The apartment’s gonna smell like wet dog,” she says. Her voice cracks a little. “So sorry, you know, in advance.”

“I—wait.” He catches the hem of her sleeve between two fingers. “Just—wait. I want—I want to say something. I don’t—I need to say something.”

“About wet dog?”

Matt shakes his head. He breathes, in and out through his nose. “You said—today. You said that you don’t—you don’t really know how to trust me anymore.”

Her heart drops. Darcy swallows, and punches the first three numbers into the keypad. “We don’t have to talk about this right now.”

“Darcy—”

“Matt, you haven’t had a lot of time to think, okay, and we’ve just walked to Flushing and back and fought like fifty people and met a ninja and had weirdly emotional talks with a mass murderer, just—it’s been a really, really terrible few days and I’m really not expecting a response right now—”

“I’m good at lying,” Matt says, abruptly. Darcy narrows her eyes.

“Is this where you tell me you’ve lied to me about something?”

“No, just—” He presses both hands to his face, hiding his nose and mouth for a moment. Ripper sits down on the sidewalk, and starts panting again. “No, I don’t—I don’t lie to you, Darcy. Or I never intend to, but—but somehow things always explode out of control and what wasn’t a lie turns into one, and—I don’t know.”

Water dribbles down behind her ear. “Oh.”

“This is coming out wrong.” Matt rubs a hand over his jaw, this time. His fingers are shaking. “I told you that I’m—nothing good happens to me, not in a way that—that sticks. Sometimes—sometimes I pass people on the street and I wonder what the difference is, between them and me, that they can—that they can trust happiness, and I can’t. And part of that is just—I don’t know. Terrible luck. You could—you could call it bad karma, maybe. But I’m—I’m really, really good at ruining things. And with everything that’s been happening, I don’t—”

Her heart’s beating very fast. “Matt—”

“I lie to myself,” he says. “I’ve always been good at it, I’ve always been able to do it, I’ve always _done_ it, even though I know—and I thought I was getting better at recognizing it. I thought I could tell, now, when I was doing it, but I can’t, I think—I started to think that maybe I’m the last person in the world who can tell. I lie to myself, and you’re right, not to trust me, because I can’t—I can’t even trust myself. Nobody should trust me, if I don’t even know when I’m lying anymore. And I don’t—I don’t get good things, Darcy. I’m not—sometimes I think I’m not good enough for good things to happen, and every second I have something that—that’s amazing, that’s so completely perfect that I can’t even breathe, I can’t help sitting there waiting for all of it to go completely wrong, because I don’t get those things. I don’t _get_ things like this, I don’t—I don’t deserve things like this, or people like you, and something in me makes me lose everything I’ve ever wanted to keep, and the past few days, it’s—”

She fists her hand up in the hem of the button-down. “Matt, seriously—”

“Please.” He heaves a breath, steps closer, and this time there’s no barrier, when he reaches out, this time he doesn’t stop; he puts his fingers to her cheek, and Darcy stays very still. The rain runs down the back of her neck, sticking in her hair. “Please just—if I don’t say it now, I don’t—I don’t know if I’ll be able to, please.”

Her mouth is sticky. Darcy nods, once, and Matt pulls back, like her skin’s too hot, like it’s scorching him. His throat works.

“I thought I could trust myself again,” he says. “After everything with Fisk, I thought I could—I don’t know. I thought I could trust myself, I thought I could handle it, but the past few days, just—I can’t, anymore. I thought I knew what I was doing but I don’t, not really, I thought—I thought I knew where I stood, but it’s like the whole world’s turned to mud and I keep slipping into something that—that sticks, that gets in your nose and ears and mouth and chokes you, and sometimes it feels like I’m dragging you into it too, even though I know you’re not—” He runs his hands over his face again. “I don’t know how to think anymore. I went into the apartment and—and your things were there but you weren’t and it was like walking into a tomb, and I don’t—I ruin everything I ever touch, and everything’s spiraled completely out of control, and I hurt you, and I hurt Foggy and Karen and Kate and just—I don’t know how to stop it, every time I try it falls apart in my hands, and I can’t—”

“Slow down—”

“I don’t want to ruin this, Darcy,” he says. “I don’t—I don’t want to lose this. I don’t want to ruin us. If I did, I don’t— I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.”

Darcy looks down at the dog. Then, carefully, she winds the end of the rope around the doorknob, and steps free of the awning, back into the rain. She’s completely soaking wet, but out here it doesn’t matter so much.  Darcy touches her fingers to his throat, to a bruise, and he shudders. She wants to choke on the downpour, cool drops rolling down her scalp and her throat and the length of her spine, dripping from her eyelashes.

“Listen to me.” She brushes her thumb over the corner of his mouth. “You haven’t dragged me anywhere. You haven’t dragged me anywhere; you haven’t made me do anything. You haven’t ruined me, Matt. Every choice I’ve made has been mine, and that’s not something you get to take on, all right? It isn’t.”

Matt closes his eyes. Water drips off his glasses. He presses his lips together, and shudders again when she drops her hand, pressing her palm to his chest over his heart.

“You’re so convinced that everything that goes wrong around you is your fault.” She can’t raise her voice above a whisper. “Not everything is.”

“Isn’t it?” His mouth twists. “This, what’s wrong with us, this is my fault. What happened with—with Castle, what happened with Kate, that was my fault. Frank—”

“Frank Castle is a man who’s made his own choices, and if you take credit for all those gangsters he’s killed he’ll probably kneecap you.”

He laughs. It sounds more like a sob.

“Open your eyes,” she says, “please,” and he does, without hesitation, blinking behind his glasses. When she draws her fingers down his cheek, she’s shaking to pieces. “You fucked up, Matt. You fucked up, and you fucked up a lot, but—but that doesn’t mean you’re not a good person, here.” She taps at his heart, once, twice. “This person, here, he’s _good._ You’re a good person, Matt, even—even when you fuck up and even when you’re a jackass and even it seems like you can’t do anything but hurt other people, because I know that’s what you meant—even when you think you can’t do anything worth something, this, here, your heart, it’s good.  You’re a human being, you fuck up, you—you drive me insane sometimes, but you’re not worthless.”

His glasses are slipping down his nose. The lenses are all raindrops. “You believe that.”

“I believe you’re a jackass and you have shit self-confidence and you like to take the blame for everything.” She tugs on the collar of his shirt, fixing it. “But you’re good, Matt. You—You’ve always been good.” 

He blinks again, and his lips part. He doesn’t say a word.

“Claire said something to me when I was—I don’t know. She said that if I can’t trust myself, then I should at least trust her, and Foggy and Karen and Kate and Jen.” She fusses with the collar again, trying to keep herself from trembling. “If you can’t trust yourself, then trust me. If you can’t trust yourself, Matt, then—then I want you trust me, when I say it. Trust me, and Foggy, and Karen, and everyone else around you who—who loves you and trusts you and thinks that you’re good, Matt. Trust me. Trust _us,_ even if you can’t trust yourself.”

She thinks that some of the damp on his face might be from tears. When he fumbles his hand up to hers, covers it, his fingers are shaking.

“You fucked up, and you hurt me, and—and it’s going to be incredibly difficult, all right, it’s _been_ difficult, but all I want is—is to fix this, okay? We’ve both made a lot of mistakes the past few days, or—or months, with a lot of people, and now you know that and I know that and what we can do is try to make it better. And if you think,” she says, fiercely, even through the prick of tears, “if you think I’m going to be any better off without you than you would be without me then _I’m_ going to kneecap you, stupid. Because we’re in this together, okay? Like—like we’ve always been. And I might not—I might not trust you, right now, and I haven’t forgiven you, and I might still want to punch you in the face until I feel like I can, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love you, or that I’m going to stop, or that you’ve—that you’ve stained me. If you keep thinking like that, I _will_ kneecap you, and then you’ll really have to sit down and take a break for your stupid damn head that’s probably still all bruised up inside like a fucking apple.”

It’s definitely a laugh, this time, and a sob, all mixed together. Matt cups his hands to her face, stroking his fingers over her skin, stepping into her and touching her like she’s something priceless, and it breaks her a little the way it always does, to feel it. “You do this every time,” he says, and she fists her hand up in his shirt again, pushing up onto her toes when he touches his forehead to her temple, breathing out over her cheek. “You—you do this every time and I don’t know how you manage it but you—it’s like I’m stuck in the dark and I can’t—I can’t sense anything, I can’t see, I can’t make out anything at all, and you come in and you bring the world back and I don’t know how you do it but you do, every single time, and I can’t lose you, Darcy, I can’t—”

“Then _trust me_.” She presses her free hand to his cheek, touches her lips to his, careful, very light, barely enough to feel. “Let me help you, don’t—don’t shut me out of this, don’t try to push me away, don’t try to take it all on yourself or think you have to face things alone, just trust me, Matt, please—”

Matt folds her into him, shaking, clutching her close like he thinks she’s going to bolt. Darcy goes up on her toes and wraps her arm around his neck. He’s holding on so tightly that she can barely breathe, her lungs and cuts and bruises all pinching at her chest, and when she hooks her nails into his hair and rests her nose to his shoulder he sags like all his strings have been cut, leaning hard into her. He puts his lips to her hair and hides, his glasses jamming into her scalp and his fingers trembling against her back. “I trust you,” he says. “I—I trust you more than I’ve ever trusted anyone.”

 _More than I’ve ever trusted anyone,_ and she thinks that might mean he trusts her more than he trusts himself. Her heart’s breaking. “Matt—”

“I’m sorry.” It dusts warm and damp over the curve of her ear. “I’m so sorry. You were—you were right, and I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I can’t—I don’t know how to say it in a way that makes it anywhere close to enough, and I know it doesn’t fix anything and I know you can’t trust me and I know that it doesn’t change what I did, but Darcy, I’m so, so sorry—”

She’s the one to kiss him. He tastes like rain, a little like salt, a little like blood, and he makes this small, desperate, keening sound into her mouth before threading his hands into her hair and kissing her back, panicked, like he’s trying to bury himself, like he wants to vanish into her and not ever come out again. She’s been shot through with cold lightning, and it sparks on her tongue. _Like thorns,_ Frank had said. Like he’s woven into her skin and yanking him free would tear most of her with him. _Makes you raw, makes you bleed,_ and she kisses him anyway because she can’t bear not to. Maybe that makes her weak, she’s not sure. If it does, she doesn’t care particularly much. Darcy curls her hand into his hair and kisses him, carefully, as quietly as she can, until the desperation fades and he slows, down into something as liquid as honey, his fingers trembling against her cheek. She shifts, puts her mouth to his jaw, and breathes into him for a minute, the rain pouring down on her head and down her back and the damn dog making unhappy noises from the nearest puddle. 

“That’s a start,” she says, after a moment. It scrapes against the inside of her throat, comes out rough as sandstone. “That’s definitely a start.”

Matt lifts his head. He smooths her wet hair out of her face, touches his lips to the side of her nose. It’s careful and tender and a little awestruck, she thinks, and she can deal with the unhappy whine from her bruises when he has that look on his face, the one that says he still can’t quite believe this is real. Occasionally it’s kind of nice for her ego.

“Tell me.” He rests his mouth to her hairline, closes his eyes. “I want—give me something to do, please. I want to make it up, please give me something. I know it’s not—that won’t fix it, I know that, but just—I want something to do, to try. Please.”

That’s. Wow, okay. She’s pretty sure she’s never heard him ask anything like that before. _Then again, he’s never fucked up this badly before._ Even when he’d lied to her, for years and years and years, that—that had been to everyone, not just to her. That hadn’t been half a dozen promises broken to her face. “First step is let me go inside, finally,” she says, and Matt huffs, mouth against her temple. “I’m a) tired, b) wet , and c) not wanting to stand out here in the rain any longer than I need to now that we’re, y’know, home.”

Matt presses his hand to her cheek. “I can see you like this,” he says. “Better than—you’re clearer, out here. I forget the angles, sometimes.”

“My nose is still swollen and I look like a drowned rat, Matthew, that’s not much of a compliment.”

He doesn’t say anything, just shakes his head and scuffs his mouth over hers, more than a raindrop of a kiss. “I like seeing you.”

“Then the next time it rains,” she says, “we can go outside. Just…I’m cold right now.”

Matt hums into her mouth, and draws back. “Okay.”

They leave patterns of clear water all the way down the hall, footprints in the elevator and smears of mud on the wooden floor, especially when Ripper shakes halfway past the fourth floor and scatters water and mud and grass bits everywhere. Still, at least she’s quiet, and so is the tiny, yappy dog in the apartment across from Matt’s, which is a miracle considering sometimes it seems like even the barest whiff of cat gets the little bastard shrieking like a siren. Matt unlocks the door, but Darcy’s the one to close it behind them, close it and lock it up again, sliding the deadbolt home and resting her forehead to the inside of the door like she’s saying hello to an old friend. She aches, and she’s not going to stop aching, not for ages, but this place has been home for almost a year now. Familiar smells and the creak of the squeaky board under her foot. Darcy bends to undo her boots and step out of them, finally deal with the blisters forming on her heel. A few feet down the hall, the dog shakes again (only roughly half the amount of grass flies off this time) and sniffs at the hem of one of Matt’s coats. Darcy unknots the rope from her collar. “I’m letting her wander.”

“Okay.”

“…wait, shit. There’s—she does need food. I don’t think she can eat any of your weird organic stuff.”

Matt ghosts his hand over the small of her back, and passes her on his way down the hall. The dog follows. _If she imprints on Matt, shit. That would be awkward._ And also weird, because Matt’s such an absolute human asshole cat that watching a half-wild, half-murderous (and yet still somehow oddly fuzzy) pit bull trail him around would be like something out of an internet meme. “There’s probably something at the—”

He stops dead. It takes her a second to process it, the shift. It’s not Matt, anymore, it’s the Devil, and he stops dead at the end of the hallway with his hands balling up into fists at his sides and all the tension that had leaked out of him down in the street back in his shoulders, curved, ready to fly. When she creeps up behind him, it’s with Melvin’s baton in her hand and all the hair on the back of her neck standing up. “Matt?”

There’s a woman settled in one of the armchairs. For a second, Darcy can’t make out her face. The lighting’s wrong, at this angle, the blaze of the scrolling billboard too dim for her to see more than sharp bones, the angle of her fingers against the arm of the chair. Then the colors shift, and it’s all yellow, splashing sharp gold over her hair, her dress, the curve of her mouth. For a second, Darcy can’t process. Nearly four years haven’t changed any of them all that much, but the clash of now and then is so stark that even as she thinks _oh, that face, I know that face,_ she actually cannot believe that this is reality. Then Elektra stands, slinking through the air like a leopard, and the spell breaks.

“Well,” she says. “Isn’t this a surprise.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reasons why they talk to Brigid instead of Brett: Brett gets the call about the dead guy at the carousel when they're wrapping up the crime scene. Here the NYPD has only just started when Matt and Darcy show up. Timing issue. /shrug
> 
> And speaking of timing, the thing with the cemetery? It's out in Flushing. Which is in like...Queens, I think, I can't remember off the top of my head. Which is half an hour drive from Hell's Kitchen. Which, walking, is 2.5 hours. I do think in canon Matt will like...catch cabs and carry his suit around because there's no fucking way he'd have such perfect timing if he had to run back and forth. Also? The image of Daredevil walking across a bridge to Queens or Brooklyn just pleases me in a deeply sadistic way. 
> 
> Also, I know the dog is described by Frank as male in canon, but sCREW THAT.


	7. The Difference Between You And Me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: You're watching _Daredevil_. 
> 
> Seriously, for content warnings: mentions of past murder, blood. broken bones, gunshot wounds, animal abuse (not a detailed description but), PTSD stuff, and Deep Feelsy Convos.
> 
> Comics people: hush your faces. You'll know what I'm talking about.
> 
> The timeline issue: Daredevil on Netflix has an absolutely terrible, contradictory timeline. So, for clarification: undergrad takes four years, law school takes three. If you start undergrad at eighteen, then when you graduate you'll be roughly twenty-one or twenty-two. If you go into law school right after, another there years, then you'll be roughly twenty-five when you get out. Even if Matt and Foggy spent a full year interning for L&Z, there's no way they'd be any more than twenty-six at the start of the series, from what the show has implied. So having Elektra and Matt be a thing ten years ago is a) insane, b) illogical, and c) impossible, because if Matt nearly bombed out of his Torts and Civ Pro classes while dating her, that sets it in law school, which _should only have been a few years before._
> 
> So, my timeline: coming across Elektra senior year of undergrad, the fancy faculty party maybe in October during their first semester at law school (Civ Pro, Torts) and breaking up/Roscoe Sweeney somewhere around spring break. Six months, loads of wrecked classes, and a loooooot of issues that Matt never looked at again. So that would be roughly four years ago, by the timeline after Fisk. 
> 
> /gets off of soapbox

“Get out,” Matt says.

Elektra wrinkles her nose. It’s incredibly weird to watch, like watching a tiger or a bear or some other kind of huge, terrifying predator lick a baby. “Oh, come on, Matthew, you needn’t be that abrupt. It’s not as though I’ve broken anything.”

“I don’t want you in here. Get out.”

In the kitchen, the dog sticks her head in the garbage can. Darcy looks from one of them to the other. On a list of _most awkward things to ever happen in your life,_ she really hadn’t expected _walk back into the apartment you share with your boyfriend to find his ex sitting in the living room_ to be one of them _._ Elektra’s eyes snap to her and stay there, magnetic and magnetizing, as Darcy goes to catch Ripper again. “How long has this been happening?” she says, and there’s a glint to her like steel. “I’m only curious. _Nelson, Murdock, and Lewis._ The three of you have been busy bees, the past few months, haven’t you? I’ve been reading the papers, about Fisk, but none of the articles ever mentioned this.” She waves her hand at the room like she’s showing off a museum exhibit. “How does it work at the office? Are you openly an item or just another dirty little secret?” 

“None of your business,” Matt says. “None of this is any of your business.”

“If you say so.” Elektra traces her fingers over the back of the couch. “It’s lovely to see you, Darcy, dear. Even if you’re holding a weapon.”

“Um.” _What the fuck._ It’s the only thing she can think. _What the actual fuck._ Darcy loosens her grip on her baton. “Nice to see you?”

“No, it isn’t,” says Matt.

“Snippy.” Elektra wrinkles her nose again, this time at the dog. “Is it the best idea to take a dog that small into a downpour? This whole place is going to smell like wet animal.”

“She’s not—” Darcy stops. She’s not processing, not really. “How did you even get in here?”

“I picked the lock,” says Elektra. “Obviously.”

“Obviously.” She can only echo things now, apparently. Ripper tugs at her hand, trying to get back into the garbage can. Darcy turns and stares hard at a banana peel before closing the lid with the end of her baton. “Because that’s how regular people get into other people’s apartments. They pick the lock.”

“Actually, I’ve found that breaking windows is simpler. And more fun.” She twists her bracelets around her wrist. “But I restrained.”

Matt goes stiff as a board. Darcy’s not entirely sure why—she kind of appreciates the fact that there isn’t any broken glass to clean up—but he does, and something coasts under her skin, a shark cutting through water. Elektra’s eyes narrow, and dart between them, her mouth curling like she’s found gold.  Water’s still dripping from his nose when he says, “What the hell do you want, Elektra?”

“Who says I want something?”

“You always want something.”

“Would you believe me if I said that I need your help?”

“Not in the slightest.”

Holy shit. This is like…Foggy versus Reyes times a million plus bad backstory and a hundred other things besides. Darcy pulls on the dog again. “I would—I’m gonna say that’s my cue and take it.”

“You don’t have to hide, dear, I just wanted to pop by and say hello.” Elektra draws her fingers down the back of the couch again, and looks at Darcy from under her lashes. “I see you at least took my advice about the hats. Oh, but you took out the piercing, that’s a shame, it suited you.”

“I stopped wearing the hats because it broke a hundred degrees last week and it’s hard to get clients to take you seriously in a beanie,” says Darcy. “And you’re not here to talk about fashion, so I’m just gonna…go. Upstairs. With the dog. And let you two work out this…” She gestures between them. In her ribs, her heart’s pinching. “Whatever this weirdness is.”

“You don’t have to go anywhere,” Matt says, not turning his face away from Elektra. He’s blank-slate cold, the way he was in court during the Fisk trial, the way he is when he’s so completely, totally furious that he shuts everything else down to keep it hidden away. There’s an odd hum to it, though. Hurt, maybe. Old raw wounds. “You live here.”

Elektra’s smile doesn’t flicker, but there’s something around her eyes that makes Darcy think of bruises. “Clearly. Don’t let me chase you out.”

“I’m not being chased anywhere,” Darcy says, shortly, and drops the baton back into her duffel bag “I’m going to go up to the roof for fifteen minutes, and then I’m going to come back down, I’m going to deal with the dog, I’m going to shower, and I’m going to sleep, because it has been a long fucking day, my feet hurt, and I’m too tired for this.”

“In that case.” Elektra twists her bracelet again. “I’ll be in town for a few days, we should catch up. Get lunch. It’s been, what, three years?”

“Four.”

“Not long enough,” Matt says, half under his breath.

“No offense, but that’s…not happening.” Darcy flicks a look at Matt, and then pulls the dog along with her. “I have work to do.”

“That’s right, I forgot,” says Elektra, airily. “He’s always been very proprietary of you and your time, hasn’t he?”

 _Holy shit._ She thinks Matt might actually snarl. Darcy shakes her head very minutely, not quite enough for Elektra to see it—judging by the way Elektra’s lashes flicker, she might have noticed anyway—and then pushes her wet hair back up out of her face. “Well, no,” she says. “Mostly I’m saying no because you broke into my apartment in the middle of the night and then started baiting people for funsies. That has more to do with it.”

“Shame.” Her smile’s all wildcat, teeth and gum and threat. “I’m sure it would have been entertaining.”

“It would have been something, that’s for sure.” Darcy whistles at the dog, and then says, “Fifteen minutes, Matt.”

He catches her arm when she passes him, holds on for a moment. He doesn’t do anything more than that, doesn’t turn away from Elektra, but he presses his fingers hard into her arm for a beat, and that stung look flickers around Elektra’s mouth again. Darcy looks from Matt to Elektra and back, and then heads up the stairs, and closes the roof access door behind her.

Somehow, the puddles and the rainstorm on the roof are far more interesting to Ripper than anything down on the ground. She bolts around the edges of the roof fast enough to nearly give Darcy heart failure, and makes a game of splashing in puddles. She can’t focus on it very well. Her mind has shut down. _Holy shit._ Elektra. Elektra Natchios. _The_ Elektra Natchios. Not an ex, but _the_ ex. Who…apparently can pick locks and break into people’s apartments and knows where Matt lives and still looks like she just walked off the front cover of _Vogue_ and there’s…apparently there’s a lot of history here that she doesn’t know about.

She’d met Elektra maybe—maybe? A handful of times that she can remember. The first time she’d just caught a glimpse when Foggy had pointed her out from across the quad, senior year. _That’s the girl Matt’s crushing on in Spanish._ The second time, it had been first semester of their 1L year, Matt had been missing classes for nearly two months straight, but for once he’d shown up for Torts and been coldcalled and completely bombed it. The moment they’d left the building, Elektra had collected him from the curb, and Christ, every time Darcy had seen her from that point on there’d been a different gorgeous car but the same chipper greeting, _hello, Darcy, dear, I’m here to abduct him for a bit_. Foggy only met her once, had only ever experienced Matt-and-Elektra in the aftermath, but Darcy—Darcy had seen her maybe half a dozen times, more than she had ever seen any of Matt’s other girlfriends. Elektra had even invited Darcy out, once, shopping on Fifth Avenue, and holy Christ, it is still to this day the single most insane experience of Darcy’s life.

But yeah. Elektra had never treated her the way Matt’s other girlfriends had. Not like she was a threat, or like she was competition, but evaluating. Half the time she’d actually seemed pleased. _Wild,_ Darcy thinks. _Wild, dark, and snarky, and she broke Matt’s heart, but she never treated me like shit_. Which seems to be continuing, whatever the hell is going on downstairs right now.

Darcy drops down onto the roof, pressing her back to the door. She props her chin in her hands. _Any other night._ Any other night would have been better than this. _Any_ other night would have been better than this one, less than five minutes after than everything they’d said, after everything that’s been going wrong lately. _Christ, was Elektra watching?_ No, she wouldn’t have been able to see the door from the apartment windows, she wouldn’t have seen any of that, definitely wouldn’t have been able to listen without Matt noticing. Something untwists in her throat. But Jesus Christ. _Fucking hell._ Elektra Natchios, and who knows what she wants, and she’s back in New York and Matt’s standing like he has broken bones and she _broke into their apartment_ and it’s been way too long of a day and she just—

There’s something pushing at her leg. It’s the dog. She’s soaking wet, but at least she’s not covered in mud anymore. Rolling in the rain took care of that. “I thought you were hyper again,” Darcy says, and the dog shakes, hard enough that the bandage on her bad ear flies off. It’s been stitched, badly, and it’s scabbed over and awful-looking. “What the hell happened to you, baby dog?”

Bones and scabs and a bit of a limp. She’s not nearly as bad as she could be. For the most part, she’s at a healthy weight, even if she’s bonier than she probably should be. She’s not biting, not attacking anyone. But the tattered ear, the shaking—no. There had been no name in the bookie’s notes, nothing for her to track him down with, and he’s more than likely dead what with the level of destruction Frank Castle had wrought on Hell’s Kitchen, but Darcy still wants to track him down and hurt him for this. A python’s living beneath her skin, wanting to coil, to crush bone. The dog nudges into Darcy’s shin, makes a noise like a deflating balloon. Darcy murmurs something that isn’t even English, just some kind of soft, soothing noise, and this time when she reaches out, the dog doesn’t leap away. There are scabs hidden away under the fur.

“Hey,” she says again. “How long do you think they’re gonna take, huh?”

The dog makes the balloon noise again, and then pushes her head into Darcy’s knee.

“That’s what I thought,” Darcy says, and plops her legs down into a puddle. The dog circles around her ankles, and then settles with her spine pressed to Darcy’s thigh. She’s not sure why that makes her want to cry, but it does. Just—Christ.

_Elektra Natchios is back in town._

Darcy gives them eighteen minutes, not fifteen, because honestly, _she_ needs that extra three minutes. It’s past one in the morning when she opens the door again, and shoos the dog back inside. Matt’s sitting on the end of the couch, still wet, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes like he’s trying to shut the world out. Darcy grabs towels from the cabinet, and folds one over his head, making a cave, before settling down to dry the dog off.

Well, she goes to settle, anyway. Matt’s hand snaps out before she can turn away, and he closes his fingers around her wrist. He’s steadier, at least. He’s not shaking. He’s terrifyingly silent, but he’s not shaking. Darcy puts the other towels on the arm of the couch. “You okay?”

His throat works. “You’re dripping.”

“The dog wanted snuggles but she didn’t want me to touch her, so I had to compromise my integrity.” When he doesn’t ask, she says, “It means I sat in a puddle.”

Matt pushes his thumb into her pulse, and leaves it there. The door’s shut. It’s also locked, which means he has to have locked it behind her. There’s no trace of where Elektra was, no evidence that she’d ever been in the apartment at all, but the air feels different. Not heavier, but thicker. Weighed down. Smoke and memory, loss and confusion and hurt. _The last thing we needed, right now._ The absolute last thing. _Castle and the gun and bang, Matt falls, and if there had been a week, maybe, a few days, more than five minutes, maybe this would be easier, maybe this wouldn’t be so overwhelming, maybe, maybe, maybe._ Maybes don’t do anything for anyone. Darcy rolls her shoulder, trying to get the kinks out. The spot where the shotgun pellet had wedged into her still aches.

“What did she want?”

“To hire a lawyer.”

Well. That’s not exactly what she expected. Or what she’d expected at all, really. “Doesn’t she have one already? Her dad had like a fleet of them if I remember right.”

“She wanted to ask me,” Matt says. It whistles between his teeth, air through hollowed bone. “She said she couldn’t trust anyone else.”

“That’s ominous.” She tugs at the towel. “What for?”

“Something to do with her father.” The words come out chipped and fragmented, splintered, shattered. He lifts his other hand, presses his fingers to the small of her back to bring her closer. “She has a meeting tomorrow with Roxxon, or something. I think—I don’t know.”

“ _Tomorrow_?” She can’t help it. Darcy whistles. “I mean, we’re magical, but we’re not that magical. Jesus Christ. Does she not know how to use Google? She could have hired a lawyer ages ago, not dropped this on us last minute.”

Matt shakes his head. “I told her no.”

“I mean, yeah.” The dog has disappeared into the bathroom. Darcy can only hope she’s not going to drag gauze out of the garbage can and choke herself to death. _Again with the puppy-killing, Lewis._ “And she broke into the apartment for what, fun?”

He doesn’t laugh. “She was playing a game,” he says. “She’s always played games.”

It’s the most he’s ever said to her about what happened with him and Elektra. It’s the most he’s said about Elektra _at all_ since spring break of their 1L year, since he’d reappeared the exact same way he’d disappeared, sudden, the way a lost pet will turn up with no warning on your doorstep. He’d been hollow for a good three months after that, vanishing for long stretches, never even mentioning Elektra’s name, and she and Foggy had learned to tiptoe around it, dropping her name only in passing, and never, ever prying about it. She has the sense that something terrible had to have happened, just from the way Matt had acted afterwards, but she’d never asked, because he’d never, ever sent the signal to anyone that it would be okay to, and she’d been scared to death that he was going to vanish again if she tried. _She’s always played games._ Darcy leaves the towels on the couch, and steps into him, and Matt presses his face into her ribs and winds his arms around her, taking deep breaths. She can’t help wondering if he’s trying to get Elektra out of his lungs, whatever she’d been wearing, because she’d been wearing _something,_ Darcy had caught hints of it when she’d passed her, something dark and curling, like heavy southern summers.

“You okay?” she says again. Matt fists one hand at the small of her back, and doesn’t pull away from her. Still, it’s a very long time before he shifts, just enough that she can hear him clear his throat.

“I didn’t think she’d come back.”

He goes quiet again. Darcy sighs. She scuffs at his hair with the towel, more to do something with her hands than anything else. She’s making a puddle on the floor, and there are goosebumps all up and down her spine that have nothing to do with the chill. “We have to figure out a name for the dog,” she says. “I can’t just go up to someone we know and say _hey, this is Ripper, she used to be in Fight Club and will probably eat any small animal that comes within her line of vision, please keep her for me._ ”

“How do you know this one isn’t Boba Fett or Star Destroyer?”

“I don’t.” Still, that gives her a few ideas. “Rey,” Darcy says, after a moment. “It starts with R, it shouldn’t confuse her too much.”

“We can’t keep the dog.”

“I know we can’t keep the dog. I don’t want to keep the dog. I just don’t want to have a dog in our apartment that is named Ripper, because it makes me think of misogynistic serial killers.”

Finally, he smiles a little, mouth curving against the wet fabric of her tank top. “Not going to name her after Frank?”

“Like Francine is a good name for a dog. Francine is barely a good name for a person, let alone that ratty four-legged garbage disposal with trust-issues.”

Matt rests his hands at her waist. When he turns his face up to her, for a second, all she can see are the bruises. They’ve crossed a bridge, somehow. On solid ground again, even with all the fissures under her feet. Standing on eggshells with so many ways they could crack. “Come on, punky. We have to figure out the dog. And then shower, and then sleep. We can talk about it tomorrow.”

Matt circles his thumb around the bone of her right hip, sketching out a lopsided pentagon, before slithering off the couch to net Rey with a towel.

.

.

.

“You didn’t tell me the pair of them were living together.”

“I didn’t think it was necessary.”

She curls her fingers tight around the edge of the mobile. She’s sixteen blocks away by now, and seven stories up, pacing back and forth on the rooftop because it’s the only way she can think to get the energy out. “How is that unnecessary information?”

“You’ve been there on reconnaissance for the last week and a half, I would have thought you’d gathered that much.”

“I couldn’t get near the apartment without him noticing.” There’s something churning in her stomach, and she can’t get it to stop. “The whole thing is nauseatingly domestic.”

Stick hums. “Still don’t think Lewis has anything to do with Lilith?”

Three hours ago, maybe, she would have said _no._ Because she’s not sloppy. She’d made a judgment about Darcy Lewis four years ago, and she still doesn’t think she was mistaken. _Potentially dangerous, but not a threat._ Not a threat to Elektra, and not a threat to Elektra getting Matthew on their side. Now, though; now, when they’re living together and she moves on the balls of her feet, silent and balanced; now when his first instinct is to grab Darcy’s wrist and keep her from leaving instead of shooing her away from the edge of the dark; now she’s not sure.

“It doesn’t matter. I don’t need or want their help.” _I don’t want his help ever again._ “I can do this alone. I told you that in Singapore.”

“Don’t need his help?” says Stick. “Or don’t want her attention?”

 _Daredevil and Lilith,_ the newspapers say, and it’s always been obvious who the Devil is, she’s kept an eye on New York for years, but Lilith—Lilith had prickled at her, thorns in her shoes. In spite of everything, in spite of all the scars she’s made in place of wounds, she still had never thought she’d come back to find him in the dark with someone else. _He wasn’t supposed to find someone else._ Because there _is_ no one else who can understand them, not truly. She’d been the only one to understand him, and he’d been the only one to know her.

Or she’d thought he’d been.

“I don’t care about Lilith,” Elektra says. “And I don’t care who she is. Her identity doesn’t matter. She just needs to not get in my way.”

“You don’t care.” Stick scoffs. “That’s why you’re calling me while you’re on assignment for the first time in four years.”

“I _don’t_.”

“Hollow, Ellie.”

( _A baton,_ Elektra thinks. She’d come in holding a baton. And _it would have been something,_ she’d said, and there had been a hint of something in her face that reminds her of—)

“Do _you_ think it’s Lewis?” she says instead.

“I think it’d be a surprise if it isn’t. He’s never been a good enough liar to be able to pull off that kind of charade. And even if it isn’t Lewis, which I doubt, she’s a distraction.” The phone statics out when he sighs. “Too damn soft.”

She doesn’t want to talk about this with Stick. She doesn’t want to hear about softness, not when the cut-up places inside are still so quick to bleed. “I’m surprised you let her live, after she threatened to shoot you.”

“We’re not all as quick with a knife as you, Ellie,” says Stick. “Back then she was just a pain in the ass, not an actual problem. Besides, Matty would’ve killed me, you know that.”

“Proprietary,” she says, half under her breath. Even the last time she’d been in New York, he’d been reticent to let anyone anywhere near either of them, Franklin Nelson or Darcy Lewis. She still can’t quite work out why. The gentle places that she’d tried so hard to wean him out of are still there, messy as bruises. “It’s absurdity.”

“Always a soft touch, Matty.”

Stick hangs up. She paces back and forth, back and forth, and then she lets herself drop. She needs to prepare for tomorrow, and if the bait she laid works, then, well—she’ll have more work to do.

.

.

.

The ten-to-six hours shift is, in her opinion, the best business decision they have made to date, because it means she sleeps for a full six and a half hours. Waking up to find a dog in her face (an ex-dog fighting pit bull in her face, scary as fuck in its own way) is not exactly the highlight of the morning, but still, when Rey lunges away to go and hide behind the couch, Darcy’s still left with six and a half hours of sleep in her own bed and waking up to find Matt propped up next to her tracing the line of one of her tattoos out with his forefinger. It aches like a sunburn, and she should probably tell him to stop—she really should tell him to stop, she thinks, curling her arms around the pillow and shutting her eyes again—but before she can decide, he draws his hand away. “Are we taking the dog in to work?” is all he says. “Because if the Saint Defiler returns, there might be a problem.”

“That’s Foggy’s case, not yours. And unless you have a better idea, we can’t just leave her here. She might eat the pillows or something.” They’d made do last night with leftover noodles and an egg, which Rey had inhaled like a starving child and then thrown back up half an hour later, but there should also probably be some actual dog food purchased. “We can say she’s your service dog, I don’t know.”

“And when we find somewhere for her to go?”

“Then I have an allergy to dogs and I started sneezing too badly for her to stay.”

He muses on that. “She’s kind of beat up for a service dog.”

“Then she was in a car accident.” She tips her head on the pillow, shifting to get her hair out of her face. “You’re doing the displacement worry thing again.”

Matt frowns. “I’m not.”

“You are.”

He opens his mouth, and then shuts it again. Darcy watches him, the curve to his mouth and the way he’s hunched, a turtle forcing itself back into a shell, before scooting over and resting her head on his bent knee. Matt freezes, the way he hasn’t in a long time. Then, very slowly, he goes back to what he was doing, tracing the edges of the compass rose.

“She’s a stray we found,” Darcy says. “If anyone asks. It’s not like we’re the only people in the city who have taken in a stray, and she acts like one, so people will believe it. She’s a little more beat-up than most strays, but we could just say we found her that way and be done with it. Not a hard sell.”

Matt tugs his fingers into her hair, and that’s a sunburn too, a still-raw ache. It’s not enough for her to ask him to stop. “I know.”

It’s nearly nine. She really should get up. Darcy closes her eyes. “You’re worried.”

“I’m not.” 

“Matt, seriously. You’re talking to me. I can tell when you’re worried. You might not want to be, but that doesn’t mean you’re not.”

He drops a hand to her shoulder, swipes his thumb back and forth over her bare skin. The clock’s ticked over to 9:04 before he clears his throat. “She showed up after four years of nothing and—and everything that happened to break into the apartment and ask for a favor she knew I wouldn’t give. I’m not worried. I want her gone.”

Which, valid. Darcy doesn’t hate Elektra—she doesn’t know enough about what happened—she only knows how Matt was, before, during, and after, and that…she doesn’t want that Matt coming back. The longer Elektra stays, the more likely he’ll suffer, and no matter how shaky they are right now, she doesn’t want to watch Matt fall apart. Or drive himself into the ground. “You said it was Roxxon?”

“Roxxon has enough shady business deals going on without us getting involved.” He’s set his jaw, now. She can hear it in how he’s biting every word he says. “She can find someone else to play games with.”

 _Is it a game, though?_ She’s not sure. She wouldn’t think Elektra would be someone capable of bringing themselves down to asking for help, but she’d still done it. _Would you believe me if I said that I need your help,_ and yeah, maybe Matt can’t believe that for good reasons, but at the same time…she doesn’t know. Darcy rolls onto her back, and looks up at him, still kind of propped against his knee. Matt’s turned his face towards the window, clenched, his forehead wrinkled and his eyes half-closed and his mouth twisted like he’s in pain. When she reaches out, touches her fingertips to his collarbone, some of the stress smooths itself out. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you talk about her.”

“There wasn’t any point. I didn’t think she would come back.”

“Will she come back here again?”

He shuts his eyes. “I don’t know.”

“She never struck me as the type to give up when she wants something, and she wanted you on the case badly enough to break into the apartment.”

“She doesn’t want me looking into her father’s paperwork,” he says, bitterly. “She wanted to mess with my head. And your head, if she knew you were here.”

“Maybe.”

“I told her no.”

“Still.” Her hair’s a mess, Jesus. She shouldn’t have fallen asleep with it wet. “Will she come back here?”

“No, she made her point. She won’t come in here again unless she’s invited. Or unless she thinks she’s invited, anyway.”

How very vampire queen of her. _How very Matt of her_ , but she doesn’t say that. “There was a point to breaking in here? What the hell kind of point was she making?”

“That she could,” says Matt. “Probably.”

 _That, or she was trying to freak me out_. “Okay, then.”

He’s been petting at her hair for a full minute before he says, “You don’t have to worry.”

“Worry?”

“About—I don’t know.” He clears his throat. “About me. Or her. You don’t—you don’t have to worry.”

“Oh.” She digests that. “Well, I mean. I’m not.”

“Really?”

Darcy rolls onto her stomach, propping herself up with her elbows. “Honestly? No. I’m worried that you’re worried—”

“I’m not.”

“You’re doing the thing.”

Matt shuts his eyes, and huffs between his teeth like she’s slapped him in the ribcage. “Is that how you’re going to point it out?”

“I’ll come up with something.” Darcy rests her chin in one hand. “Do you not want me to point it out?”

He clears his throat. “Just—need to get used to it.”

“If you don’t want me to—”

“I do,” he says, and touches his fingertips to the back of her jaw. “I’ll—I do.”

“Okay, then.” Darcy clears her throat. “It’s not weird to worry about it. I don’t think. Her coming back, I mean. I don’t know much about what happened, and I’m a little freaked out that she seems to think it’s kosher to like…break into people’s houses and sit and wait for them like Dracula, but clearly there are a lot of issues here that probably need some time and attention. It just…it sucks that this is happening now, that’s all.”

“There isn’t a problem,” Matt says, flatly. “I don’t care what she’s doing here. I just want her gone.”

“Doesn’t change the fact that there are issues. Which you might want to think about taking a look at sooner or later just because you look like you’ve been stabbed in the throat and she was barely here for twenty minutes, but—yeah.” She hooks her hair out of her face, over her shoulder. “I’m worried about a lot of things, right now. And we’re not—there are things that we have to work on. But that doesn’t mean I’m worried about you and her.”

He looks like he wants to say something, but he can’t find the words. His throat works. “We should get up. We’re going to be late.”

 _And there go the shields, right back up._ Darcy sighs, and searches his face. “I know—I mean, I don’t know. The last major break-up I had was with Eduardo and that was…I dunno. But whenever you want to talk about it, Matt, you can tell me, seriously. Just—I don’t know what happened with you two, but clearly it was bad, so. If you want to talk about it, you can tell me.” She wets her lips. “I mean, if you want to. If you don’t feel like you can, or you think it might be awkward, then Foggy’s around. He’ll probably be able to say _damn, what an asshole_ better than me.”

Matt touches his thumb to her chin, brushes down the line of her throat. “It just—it depends.”

“On what?”

“On whether or not she takes the hint,” Matt says, “and gets the hell out of our city.”

That right there, that was a growl. Spitty angry cat noises. When he scuffs his fingers over her throat again, Darcy tips her head back, and leans away. Not that it isn’t, you know, kind of hot to have a growly, ridiculously good-looking guy who somehow, incredibly, loves you brushing his fingers over your pulse point, but she still hurts, and what she would have done a month ago, or a week ago, isn’t anywhere close with what she feels comfortable with now. She’s pretty sure Matt’s too raw for any of it, either, judging by the way his mouth shifts when she moves back. Relief, she thinks. Not disappointment. “It is,” she says. “Our city. I wasn’t born here, not like you, but—but it is ours, I think.” She frowns. “Am I allowed to call it that if I’m adopted?”

“You’re the one who talks so much about the importance of bonding over blood.”

“That’s true.” She rolls off the bed, and onto the floor. In the kitchen, Rey jumps, and yips. “Come on. I’ll deal with the dog.”

It’s cooler this morning, at least. She doesn’t have quite the egregiously huge pit stains from walking to work that she’s had since this damn heat wave started, and she’s pretty sure the only person she has to thank for this is Mother Nature. ( _Global warming does exist, and anyone who claims it doesn’t is an idiot._ ) Foggy’s in, but Karen isn’t, and when she goes into the kitchenette to find the coffee beans she discovers that the bag is empty and there’s nothing else available. _Shit._ Rey sticks close to her and shies away simultaneously, somehow, creeping back when Foggy tries to touch her and traipsing after Darcy like…well. Like a lost puppy. Which essentially she is. It’s hard to tell how old she is, but Darcy really seriously wouldn’t be surprised if she was more than six months old, let alone close to a year. She doesn’t let Darcy touch her, but she does follow, and even considering how bad Darcy is with dogs, she’s about ninety-nine percent sure that following is better than cowering in the corner and shivering whenever someone walks by.

The deposit—well. The deposit (made in the name of one _E. Natchez,_ which is both possibly the worst alias Darcy’s ever seen, and probably just…deliberately really bad) is a mess. “We can’t take it,” Matt says, and at the same time Darcy says, “Don’t use it,” and Foggy’s eyes get really narrow and flick back and forth between them.

“Can there be an explanation, or do I get left in the dark, or—”

“I don’t—” Matt stops, shuts his eyes, takes a breath. “Look, just—I can—”

“Matt,” says Darcy, quietly, and he stops again. “We talked about this.”

“You guys knew there was gonna be a deposit?”

“No.” She doesn’t look away from Matt. “It’s not the deposit, Foggy, it’s just—a thing we talked about, that’s all.”

Matt fists his hands up, and then loosens them, very slowly. _Come on, Matt. Trust us._ He takes another breath. “Elektra,” he says, like it stings, like his jaw is snapping in the doing of it. “The—the money’s from Elektra.”

“Elektra.” Foggy’s eyebrows snap together. “Wait, Elphaba? Seriously? What the hell is she doing giving us money, that’s—”

Darcy leaps in, then, because Matt has the _I’m getting stabbed over and over with your words right now_ face, and she’s not entirely sure Foggy’s noticed. “Just don’t use it, will you? Marisol’s first payment should come through sometime today and that’s—that’s fine, but whatever Elektra deposited, don’t use it. Matt didn’t take the job, so—”

“She offered you a _job_? Dude, when the hell did this happen?”

“It didn’t happen. I didn’t take the job. It doesn’t matter.”

“And yet there is like an enormous lump of cash in the business account right now, so she seems to think you did. Or she assumed you’d take it, which is fucked in its own way, it’s not like we’re for sale. Jesus Christ.” Foggy rubs his hands over his face. “Jesus, okay. Yeah, no. Not using the blood money. Or the tainted funds, or whatever we want to call them right now. I can try to get the deposit reversed, I mean, there was a canceled appointment so I have a free hour—”

“Who’d we lose?”

“Not Marino or Jacinto or Maxwell. Or Guerra. Mrs. Takatomi jumped ship, though, which, I mean, Reyes has been breathing down our necks for the past few days, it makes sense. Just kinda sucks.” He sucks his teeth. “Just—seriously? Elphaba?”

“You don’t have to call her Elphaba, it’s not like her name is cursed.”

Matt’s gone very quiet, leaning against the edge of Karen’s desk and tucking his chin in towards his chest. When she leans next to him, he slips his fingers through hers, and holds on. Foggy sees it—his eyebrows snap together again, of course he sees it—but he doesn’t say a word. “What did she even want?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Matt shakes his head. “Some—some business deal with some holdings of her father’s, I didn’t ask, I don’t—I really don’t care.”

Which is a lie, she thinks, all on its own. He does care. She’s not entirely certain that it’s possible to not care about someone who you were in love with, even if they broke your heart. (And Christ, she’s never thought about it this way, but if Matt was in love with Elektra during law school, and if—if what he’d said about his feelings for her, Darcy, is true, then…holy shit. She shoves that aside, because _do not think about that right now._ ) If he didn’t care at least a little he wouldn’t be snapping, and he definitely wouldn’t be this twitchy. But he hasn’t let go of her hand, so she picks that to focus on instead of worrying about his temper. Rey crawls under Karen’s desk.

“Okay.” Foggy wipes his hands across his face again. “Okay. So if we don’t use the money, then we need to at least come up with some way to have a stopgap between now and the next due date for bills, because we have a million envelopes that are stamped _final notice_ and it’s super intimidating, seriously.”

“Marisol’s first payment should come through today,” Darcy says again. “Maybe pay electricity first, we can’t exactly do work if we don’t have working computers. Even if we can’t pay off all of it, we can pay off enough that they won’t turn the lights off. If we have to go down to coffee shops or whatever for WiFi, that’s something we can do, but the electricity—”

“Yeah, no, clear on the logic.” Foggy’s eyes dip to their tangled hands again. “So, um, are you guys, you know, okay, or—”

“We’re, um.” Curse her suddenly swollen tongue. “We’re—”

“—working on it,” Matt finishes quietly, and sweeps his thumb across her fingers. “We’re working on it.” He turns his face towards hers. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Cool,” says Foggy.

Something’s percolating in the back of Darcy’s head, some kind of reckless, darting thing, edging too close to insane. Because yeah, if anyone knows what Elektra would want, showing up at their place in the middle of the night, it would be Matt. It’s more than likely he’s right and all she was doing was playing a game. But at the same time—

_Would you believe me if I said that I need your help?_

“I think,” she says, “you should go and see what the meeting is about.”

Matt jerks, next to her, and whips his head around. His lips part. “ _What_?”

“Like you said, it’s sketch as hell, which means, you know. Probably something’s going on. I don’t know if it’s our usual kind of weird, but it might be something weird. She dumped a lot of money on our heads—do I want to know the total?”

“No,” Foggy says. “Trust me, no.”

“Okay. Then she assumed she could make us work for her, and paid us preemptively in probably obscene figures to make it a bribe in case she couldn’t, and that, more than anything, pisses me off about all of this. ” She chews the inside of her cheek. “And you’re worried.”

“I’m—”

“She’s your ex, Matt. No matter what happened with you two, just—your brain gets set in grooves about certain people, even after horrible circumstances. That’s not wrong, exactly, it’s just…how people work. So.”

He shuts up, and just blinks at her. She’s shocked him speechless again and it’s kind of oddly liberating. He’s good at doing it to her, so, turnabout.

“You’re worried, and I’m not, and if you want to know what’s going on, then you can ask, and if you don’t, then whatever, either way.” She presses her shoulder into his. “Besides, if you go, we might get some kind of ammunition for if she decides to break into the office.”

Matt chokes, and starts to cough. Which could be a bad thing or a good thing, but he hasn’t pulled away from her yet, and even if he’s not laughing, some of the jaw clenching has gone down. In the door of his office, Foggy crosses his arms over his chest. “Is there going to be someone breaking into the office? Because that’s…that could be a problem.”

“Really doubt it,” Darcy says. “Like…really doubt it.”

“I kind of want to know where the theory came from in the first place, but—”  

“You don’t, seriously—”

“—but yeah, I mean. We already have the District Attorney’s office crashing down on our heads, let’s add investigating shady business dealings made by the fathers of our exes to the list, not like it can hurt us too badly. Except, you know, that it can, and we can like…die in poverty and possibly on the street.”

“Foggy.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” He flaps a hand at her. “Honestly it’s easier for me to think about than whatever the hell it is you people have been doing. I can fight numbers and corruption and whatever, that’s easy. Just don’t ask me to throw a punch right now, I’ll probably hit myself.”

“Classy, babe,” she says, and blows a kiss. Foggy flips her off, and stalks back into his office.

“You really think I should go,” Matt says. He presses his fingers hard into the back of her hand. “You think it’d be a good idea?”

“I think that it’s probably going to turn out to be nothing. If there’s a meeting at all, it’ll be just what she told you it was, and you don’t even have to go into the building to figure out that much.” She tugs on his tie. “And if, somehow, there _is_ a thread here, then it’s not necessarily a bad idea to tug on it and see what’s on the other side. Either way, it’ll stop you from obsessing over it for the rest of the week and letting her get in your head.”

“Isn’t going to the meeting letting her get in my head?”

“You wouldn’t be going to the meeting, you’d be standing outside. You wouldn’t even have to talk to her. It’d just be reconnaissance.” Matt still has a look on his face like he thinks she’s an alien, but he’s not rejecting it flat out. Maybe this is an incredibly stupid idea—it’s one of her ideas, it’s probably stupid—but…who knows. “If you don’t want to, Matt, then it’s fine, I just…don’t want you to worry yourself over something that probably will turn out to be nothing.”

“I’m not—”

“From now on, when you say things like that, that I know are wrong and you’re not entirely sure of? I’m going to say whale shark.” She pulls on his tie again. “Whale shark, Matt. Whale shark in the middle of the room.”

He stops, and takes a breath, squeezing her fingers tight enough to ache. “Why whale shark?”

“Because it’s a huge spotted sea creature that has a big mouth that it uses to eat absurdly tiny things, I don’t know. It’s the first thing that popped into my head.”

“Actually the first?”

“Quit arguing.”

“Bossy,” he says, but he shuts up for a minute. When he speaks again, it’s so low that Foggy doesn’t even notice. “I shouldn’t be worried. I should—I don’t want to worry about her. I don’t care, I just—”

He stops.

“It’s not the same.” Darcy swallows. “I mean, it can’t be the same, but—but I kind of feel that about my mom, a little bit. Like I said, like—there are grooves in your brain, old habits. If my mom showed up, and asked me for help, I don’t…I don’t know what I would do. I left years ago and I haven’t gone back and I haven’t spoken to her at all, but sometimes I sit and I think about her and I still…she’s my mom, y’know? I still care. I don’t want to be her, I don’t want to be near her, I think she’s bad for me and I don’t want anything to do with her anymore, but she’s my mom and I loved her for such a long time that I can’t cut the feeling out. We can’t help who we care about. Even when they’ve beat the living shit out of us, we can’t help worrying, sometimes. It’s just how human beings work.” 

Matt tips into her, and leans for a while. Darcy shifts around to get a good look at where Rey is—still curled up under the desk—and then leans back. Prodding at each other’s bruises, she thinks. But still. This is the worst timing, and just…they can deal with it, for a few days.

“I think you’re worried and you’re going to keep being worried,” she says. “Even if you don’t want to be, I think you’ll stay worried until you can at least figure out what’s going on. I also think, kitty-cat Matt, that you’re curious, in spite of yourself, which isn’t a good combination for you. And I think that the person I remember Elektra being wouldn’t have broken into the apartment in the middle of the night to ask for help unless she didn’t think she might need it eventually.” She shrugs. “I never knew her as well as you, but she never struck me as the type to ask for help at all.”

Matt presses his lips together. “I’m not sure I knew her either,” he says. “Not really.”

Darcy squeezes his fingers. “All the more reason to have a little context.”

“Karen’s coming,” he says. “She brought coffee.”

“Karen is an actual angel come to earth, but you’re changing the subject.” Darcy slips off the desk. “Like I said, it’s up to you. But I do think that some kind of closure would be good. And if she’s here, then…I don’t know. I just don’t like seeing you make this face.”

“What face?”

“The _I’m suffering because I’m too Catholic to talk about it_ face.”

Matt chokes, and ducks his head. Darcy catches his other hand, and links her bandaged fingers through his, holding on.

“Up to you,” she says again. “I just don’t like that she seems to think she can buy any of us. And even if I think that it’s not my place to get in between you and her with whatever drama the pair of you had, then…then I don’t know. I might want to get up in her face just for that.”

“No.” He shakes his head. “No, you don’t—you don’t need to talk to her, it’s okay.”

“It’s not need, it’s want, and if I do, then it’ll be about work and not about you. Whatever baggage the pair of you have, that’s between you, and I don’t want to stick my nose in that.” She searches his face. “Unless you want me to, in which case, I will. I just think that maybe getting some closure about her will help you, that’s all.”

Outside, Karen curses. They only have a few seconds. Matt settles, a little, putting his shoulders back, and when he lifts her hand to his mouth it’s very tentative, like he thinks she’ll draw away. Her bandaged knuckles sting a little, when he touches his lips to them, but she doesn’t move. “You keep trying to fix things,” he says, and lets her hands go. “Sometimes things can’t be fixed.”

“I don’t need you and Elektra to be best broskis or whatever. I don’t think that’s possible, considering what little you’ve said. I just…sue me for not wanting to see you tearing yourself into little bits over someone who’s probably not gonna stick around anyway.”

“Who’s not gonna stick around anyway?” Karen says, and narrows her eyes when she sees Matt leaning against the edge of her desk. “Careful, those are the financial papers for the past year. If we _do_ get audited, I want every single one so we can make a chart of our downfall into deep, everlasting debt.”

“Explains why they smell like cigarettes,” says Matt, a little rough. He shifts off the desk, and Darcy draws her hands out of his. “Sorry. Disaster averted.”

“Narrowly.” Karen’s eyes flick from Darcy to Matt and back again, and then she holds out the tray of coffees. There’s a whole hive of newspapers stuck under her arm, which is never a good sign. “Arabica. We ran out yesterday and I haven’t gone to buy a new bag of instant stuff yet.”

“Jen usually has a few bags of things in her hidden cabinet, if you want to steal. She probably wouldn’t notice for a year, what with all the stuff she has to work on now that the Punisher’s in custody.”

“The Punisher.” Karen kicks the door shut behind her. “Can we at least call him Castle? It’s a stupid codename. It makes me think of old video games and Ubisoft bullshit.”

“Cool with me.” She’s still not all that fond of the slip that’s had her calling him Frank, especially after everything. God, just—all her emotions are mixing up about everything and she’s _trying_ , she is, she just doesn’t know how to handle things. Not really. So it’s easier to think about other people. “You okay? You look like you didn’t sleep.”

“I didn’t.” Karen raises her voice. “Foggy, coffee.”

“Queen,” Foggy shouts through the closed door, and goes back to his phone conversation. She thinks he might be arguing with the bank.

“So,” Karen says. “Who’s not gonna stick around where?”

Without any prompting—which, holy shit—Matt says, “An ex.”

“Oh.” Karen’s voice is odd. “That’s—oh. Darcy’s or yours?”

“His,” Darcy says.

“Awkward.”

“You have no idea.” Subject change. Subject change, right now. “Don’t sit down at your desk right now, there’s a dog underneath it.”

“A _dog_?”

“I’m going to work,” Matt says. He pulls away from her. “And—and think.”

“Okay.”

He shuts the door to their office very quietly behind him. Karen blows out a sigh, and lifts both pale eyebrows at Darcy. She doesn’t ask, because it’s not like Matt can’t hear them as clearly as if he were still in the room, but she does tip her head in a question. Darcy shrugs. “No blood will be spilled in the office, unless one of us does something stupid. Or I slip and put an elbow through the wall.”

“Okay.” She huffs through her nose. “When did the whole—”

“Last night.”

Karen blinks. “So Castle and then—”

“Yeah.”

“Ouch.” She blinks. “Oh, you had a call yesterday, I forgot—” Karen digs through the piles of paperwork on her desk, and extracts a post-it. “Um, that racial discrimination case, Marisol Guerra, she called. She wanted to meet up with you today, if you could manage it. She had some questions for you.”

“I only filed yesterday,” Darcy says, but she takes the post-it anyway and looks at it. Karen’s handwriting is a mess. Still, she can at least translate enough to tell the difference between fives and threes, which is all that matters. It’s not the number that she has for Marisol, that’s for sure. “Is this a work number?”

“She didn’t say.”

Ah, well. “You mind watching Princess Rey while I call her back?”

“Is that the dog’s name?”

“I mean, it’s better than any of the other options that were in the bookie’s notebook.” Darcy shrugs. “And you can’t tell me Rey isn’t a princess if she’s related to Leia.”

“Shush,” says Karen. She crouches, and holds out her hand out, still out of reach in case Rey lunges, fingers curled, palm up. Under the desk, something clatters, like Rey’s jerked back. Still, when Karen doesn’t flinch, Rey inches forward to sniff very delicately at the polish on Karen’s fingernails. She’s redone them, a pale silvery pink that’s like sunlight on steel. “Bookie?”

“Dogfighting.”

“Oh,” says Karen, and lets Rey knock her back onto her ass to shove her head into Karen’s chest. “Hi, suddenly intimidating dog.”

“She couldn’t exactly stay with Frank, and if we’d left her for the cops I’m really not sure what would have happened, so I dragged her back with me last night. In the rain, which was less than fun, but whatever, at least she’s not getting her throat torn out.”

Karen scuffs her fingers along Rey’s shoulder. “Stay with Frank?”

“When you say Frank you mean Castle?” Foggy sticks his head out of the office, eyeing Rey and Karen’s fingers and how close Karen’s fingers are to Rey’s admittedly huge jaw. “As in, Frank Castle, scary shooter dude? Frank Castle, who tried to kill basically everyone in this room, who has burned half the city, and yet apparently has enough of a heart left to save a stray dog?”

“She was at the Burren Club. Took her with him when he walked so the cops wouldn’t put her down. What did the bank say?”

“They’re dealing with it.” Foggy shakes his head. “Frank Castle, animal lover. People aren’t supposed to be confusing.”

“Tell me about it.” Darcy makes an executive decision, and hands Karen the leash. “I brought her in because I didn’t know what else to do with her. I don’t even know if she’s housetrained. She didn’t mess anything up last night and she hasn’t bitten anyone but she’s scared of people, she flinched the whole way over here.”

“I mean, dogs that are bred to fight are generally abused really badly to get their aggression up, so that would make sense.” Karen’s very soft, now. She doesn’t move, lets Rey sniff her shirt and her ribs and her hand and doesn’t try to touch her. “She’s willing to ask for attention, though, which is good.”

“And how would you know that?” Foggy’s very antsy in the doorway, watching all this. “Is she telepathic? Are you the Dog Whisperer?”

“Don’t talk to me about the Dog Whisperer,” Karen says. “My mom works with dogs. She rehabilitates a lot of animals, actually. There’s not a lot to do in the middle of nowhere, Vermont, and some people decide to treat their animals like shit because of it. I think she’s on speed dial for three sheriff’s offices.”

“Oh.” Rey steps off of Karen, and slinks around until she can hide under Karen’s desk again. “I mean, do you know where you would even start with something like this?”

“I wasn’t allowed to go near the dogs with violence issues,” Karen says. She’s keeping her voice very measured. “I’m not even sure she’s fought all that much. She’s acting more like an abuse case than anything, and those are complicated in their own way. She just—she’s willing to step on people and ask for attention, and that’s better than nothing. It could be much worse.”

Foggy looks at Darcy. He cocks an eyebrow. “I mean, she can stick around with us today if there’s nowhere else she can go, but we can’t exactly have a potentially violent dog in the office. Especially not with Zeus the Saint Defiler being dragged in every other day.”

“That would be a bad idea.” Karen shifts her chair out of Rey’s way, and sits down again, the leash still looped around her wrist. “The last thing we need right now is a lawsuit from a client. What do you want to do, find her a place to live?”

“I don’t know, maybe. Doggy rehab. Narnia.”

“I know someone,” Karen says. “I mean, Santino knows someone, and I kind of know them, but they work with animals here in the city. I think they might be able to help.”

This is about as interesting as hearing that Foggy knows someone in the Dogs of Hell. Darcy blinks, and blinks again. “Wait, really?”

“I know people outside of the office, you know,” says Karen, but not in a mean way. “Let me just—I’ll call and see if they can meet with me, gimme a couple hours. And I’ll watch the dog,” she adds, “while you guys are working. If Zeus shows up—”

“Lock her in with me.” Darcy raps on the top of the desk, and stops abruptly when Rey jumps underneath. “Can do.”

“I still can’t believe your mom rehabilitates animals, though,” says Foggy. “I never knew that.”

Karen looks down at her paperwork, and hooks her hair behind her ear. “You never asked.”

Darcy had known. She’d forgotten, but she’d known. She bites the inside of her cheek at the look on Foggy’s face. “You should be working on Zeus, by the way, Fog. It’s not like irate neighbors with defiled St. Francis statues get any less persnickety when you leave them alone for a week. It’s a miracle Zeus even still wants to associate with us, considering Reyes being a petty little shit.”

“Right.” Foggy watches Karen for a second or two longer, mouth pursed. “Right, I’ll—yeah.”

“So?” Darcy heaves a breath. “What did you end up doing last night? I texted you when we made it back to the apartment, but you never responded.”

Karen’s eyes dart sideways. She dumps her newspapers on her desk. “I—you can’t be mad. We talked about it, you can’t be mad.”

“Mad about what?” says Darcy, slowly.

“We broke into Castle’s house,” says a voice, and then Kate swans in, back in her wedge heeled boots and in a clingy purple top that bares her arms. “Ben Urich approved. There was a security company we had to run from and everything. It was all very _Mission: Impossible_.”

“ _What_ ,” Matt bursts out from inside the office, and then chaos reigns again. Darcy rubs her temples, and wishes she had an aspirin.

.

.

.

 **Daily Bulletin (@dailybulletinnyc):** Who is Frank Castle and where did he come from? Find the full story here. dbl.co/…

 **Rising Santino (@saintvasquez):** @theangelofmercy They saved my city instead of letting some old white dude burn it down. Hard not to like them after that

 **The Urich Report (@theurichreport):** Vigilantism and Its Consequences: The Avengers Effect. tur.co/…

 **Hero Watch (@maskwatchnyc):** @theurichreport You sure you want to be posting that considering everything?

 **RooKate (@archersdoitbetter):** @maskwatchnyc You people just keep sticking yourselves on my shit list and you won’t enjoy the consequences

 **Rising Santino (@saintvasquez):** @archersdoitbetter Need help with that?

 **RooKate (@archersdoitbetter):** @saintvasquez You are my fav amigo

 **Rising Santino (@saintvasquez):** @archersdoitbetter Please don’t use Spanish irresponsibly.

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.

.

In some ways it’s a good thing that Reyes has been being so nasty and driving their clients away, because it means no one interrupts the recap of everyone’s midnight shenanigans. Karen and Kate with Frank Castle’s house; Darcy and Matt, Frank and Brannigan and Miss Ninja. Elektra’s a side-note, for the most part, or she would be if Matt didn’t keep blinking and going “Hm?” when someone asks him a question. Darcy takes over after a while, and when he snags her hand under the table again, dragging his thumb across her knuckles, she doesn’t twitch. There’s nothing on anyone who could even come close to a profile of Miss Ninja in the case files Karen skived off of Tower, which means they’re back to the drawing board. As for Brannigan himself, just a preliminary Google search has many nasty things to say. He’d left New York City right before Fisk started taking all the power in the underworld, fifteen years ago, now, but before that…Christ. Lots of body parts in garbage bags. Basically, the eighties and nineties were not a good time to be in Hell’s Kitchen.

Marisol doesn’t pick up the phone when Darcy calls, but someone else does, a woman named Kalia—“Yeah, I’m Kalia Blake,” she says, “you’re the lawyer, right?”—so the conversation is a little fruitful, anyway. Darcy’s not particularly inclined to file a million suits against MSM, but at the same time if there are people willing to come in and work with them and maybe, eventually, get them rewarded by the court for prosecuting civil rights cases, then she’ll take the work and the exhaustion over the impending debt. She leaves a message for Marisol with Kalia, and hangs up to keep working on everything she’s been letting slide.

Matt goes. She kind of expected it, but he still seems really, really uncomfortable with the idea of it, so she doesn’t make a big deal out of it all. “Tell me what happens,” she says, and when he bends and kisses the top of her head before he leaves she doesn’t protest. Rey’s curled herself into the space behind Darcy’s potted fern, and sits there shaking on and off, which is probably the most depressing thing she’s ever seen in her life. Karen keeps peering into the office to look at the dog, and Darcy’s not entirely sure if it’s because of her newfound fascination with the idea of providing context for Frank Castle, or because of her background with rescue dogs, or because Karen might be seeing something in Rey that’s familiar (and isn’t that an awful thought) but eventually Darcy catches Rey, hooks the leash back up to her, and gives her to Karen to keep under the desk.

It’s about eleven when Kalia calls back—Kalia, not Marisol—to let Darcy know that Marisol can meet her whenever and wherever she specifies. “She’s playing right now, she asked me to call you, she hasn’t had a chance to get on the phone all day.” Which, weird, but whatever. Darcy gives Kalia the street crossing for Mug Shots, and says “one o’clock maybe?” and then Kalia’s hung up. End of story. It gives her some time to browbeat Marino’s opposition for a while, at least.

She has her earbuds back in and Halsey on repeat when the door to her office opens, and Santino pokes his head in. “Hey. Karen said you were in here.”

“What are you doing here?” Darcy leans back. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah, just escort duty.” He yanks his hood off his head. His hair’s getting absurdly long, poofing out at the back of his head like a cottontail rabbit. Darcy kind of wants to clip it, a little, but Santino likes it, and, y’know. Whatever works. “Since when does _la tigresa_ take in dogs?”

“Since _la tigresa_ has a heart of gold, you monster.” He’s too tall. Darcy goes up on her toes and kisses his cheek, because Santino’s a darling, and it’s not like he’ll actually read into it, considering he’s pretty firmly in the _really likes dudes_ camp. “Who are you escorting?”

When Karen had said _someone who might be able to help,_ Darcy had been picturing an ASPCA badass, not a teenage girl in a Tweety Bird t-shirt. She barely looks tall enough to get on a rollercoaster at Coney Island, let alone do anything with a traumatized dog. Maybe fourteen at the most. Santino crosses his arms over his chest as he watches, standing at her shoulder. Karen’s standing between, talking with the little girl, too soft for Darcy to hear. “Reynardine introduced me,” says Santino quietly, as the girl steps away from Karen without a word and drops down to her knees to offer her hands to Rey. “They used to be homeless. They to Midtown Science, now.”

 _They?_ Darcy eyes the girl—the kid, she corrects—again. “Midtown Science is a good school.”

“They’re lucky,” Santino says. “Their aunt found them a few months ago, took them in where their parents wouldn’t.” He gives Darcy a _look._ “They’re different.”

 _Ah._ “Like you’re different or like Jess is different?”

Santino wrinkles his nose at her in a little smile. “Both. Chat’s just quieter than Jess, is all. They don’t like talking about it.”

“Their name is Sophia,” Karen says, as she comes to stand on Darcy’s other side. “But don’t call them that, they go by Chat.”

She pronounces it the French way, _chat_ , like _chat de lune_ and _chat noir._ Like cat. Darcy nods, and watches as Rey creeps out from underneath the desk, nose first, then her head. “And how’d you get involved, Kare?”

Karen and Santino look at each other for a moment. Then Santino clears his throat. “Karen helps me with them, sometimes. Not Chat, but other kids.”

“Really?”

“I have a lot of their numbers.” Karen won’t look at her anymore. “I can’t do a lot for them, but they know I’ll come and get them if they ask and not expect anything else. It’s enough, sometimes.”

It shouldn’t be a surprise, she thinks, that Karen’s made herself a brood mom for homeless kids the same way Santino’s turned into a Big Brother. Still, she can’t speak for a moment. This—this might be why Karen stopped calling in the middle of the waterfront, stopped asking for company. _That makes so much more sense, now._ “Karen.”

“I don’t want to make a big deal of it, and it hasn’t cut into working hours yet, just—I like knowing that if they have a phone they have my number. And even if they don’t, they still have my number. Just in case.”

She clears her throat. “Anyone ever take you up on it?”

“Chat, once or twice.” Karen hooks her hair behind her ears, not quite able to meet Darcy’s eyes anymore. “Um, Mattie, the one that Jess knows. Some of the ones you’ve met through Santino.” Santino dips his head. “And a handful of others. I didn’t mention it because I didn’t want to scare them, I had to promise a lot of them I wouldn’t tell anyone their names or where they are most of the time or any of it. There are a lot of kids here who are running from people, and learning that I work at a law firm doesn’t exactly make them want to trust me. Even if we do a lot of work for the ones Santino brings in.”

“They barely trust me,” Santino says, “and I used to—y’know.”

 _Used to spend more time on the streets than he did at home_ , she finishes, silently. Rey’s crept completely out from underneath the desk, now, and she’s curled into Chat’s lap. Chat’s still whispering, running their hands over Rey like they’re tracing out runes.

“It won’t cut into work,” Karen says again. “I just wanted—I don’t know.”

“If it does cut into work then I don’t think of us will actually mind,” Darcy says. “I mean, I wouldn’t mind, at least.”

Karen’s mouth flickers into a little smile. It fades again, almost as fast. “Okay.”

“Santino,” Chat says, and turns around. Their voice is incredibly quiet, barely audible even standing a few feet away. “And—oh. Hi. Were you there before?”

“I’m Darcy,” Darcy says. “And yeah, but I was in the office. You’re Chat?”

“Mm.” Chat gives Santino a long look—Santino nods, once, very carefully—and then they look down at Rey again. “I talked to her. She won’t attack anyone. She didn’t really want to, but she won’t, now, unless you ask her to. I made that really clear.”

Darcy blinks. “If I ask her to?”

“She says that you took her away from bad people.” Chat’s eyes flicker to Darcy, and then back down to the dog. “She says that you took her away and you haven’t hit her, and she didn’t really know what to do about it, but she gets it now. I promised her no one in this office will hurt her, and she believes me, but I might have to come back and talk to her again to make sure she remembers.”

Chat’s expression says _don’t make a liar out of me or I’ll kill your children._ Which, valid.

“If you want,” Karen says, in the same gentle, steady voice she’d used when they’d brought Rey in. “It’d be a big help if you did.”

“She’s scared,” Chat says. “That’s all it is. She’s been scared for a long time, and now we get to help her not be scared.” They run their hands down Rey’s ribs, and Rey doesn’t flinch. “If you come down here I can tell her what commands mean, and who you are, and then she’ll know for sure that she’s supposed to listen to you and not bite when you tell her not to and all the rest of it.”

She’s not crying. You’re crying. Darcy heaves a breath, and wipes her face. “Yeah, sure.”

“Who’s she staying with?”

Darcy looks at Karen. Karen looks at Darcy. Then Karen folds herself down onto the floor like a colt, tucking her legs up under her. “Me,” she says. “Rey is staying with me.”

Santino blinks. “You sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure.” Karen fiddles with the hem of her skirt rather than look at anyone. “She’ll be staying with me. She’ll be good for when I have to go wandering around in the middle of the night.”

Chat’s eyes narrow. “Do you want me to give her a word to let her know she needs to bite someone?”

“You can do that?”

“It’s just making sure she understands. Like I said, it might take a few times, but animals aren’t stupid. Most of them already understand a lot more of what we say and do then we actually know, she just gets more context if I talk her through it.” Chat’s eyes dart to Darcy again. They turn pink, and look down at Rey. “If you tell her to do things, she’ll listen.”

“What kind of commands?”

“I mean, basic ones.” Chat shrugs. The more words they manage, the less their voice shakes. “I won’t teach her tricks, that’s stupid. I can tell her to warn you if you meet someone she recognizes, one of the people who were hurting her. I can tell her not to attack people who don’t need it, and to stay with you and to not bite you no matter how mad or frustrated she gets.”

“She needs to not go after cats,” Karen says. “My roommate has a cat. She needs to know not to go after cats. Or other dogs, or children, or—or basically anything, really, unless she’s asked.”

Chat purses their lips. “That’s easy enough.”

“Like…under any circumstances.” Karen makes a face. “This cat is kind of a pain in the ass.”  

“I can talk to the cat too, if you want. She shouldn’t bite. It’s rude.”

The possibility of a Darla that doesn’t hate anything and anyone on sight is so strange that Darcy actually can’t speak, for a moment. “You do this for a lot of people?”

“Chat works for the Humane Society after school,” says Santino, and Chat turns pink again. “They’re really good at what they do.”

“Animals like me and they listen to me, so. They let me go in all the rooms even though they’re not really supposed to.”

“Let’s go over what she should know to warn me about,” Karen says. “We can use the conference room, I think. And—and we should try to figure out if anything is going on with her, so if she does need to go to the vet, we can manage that.”

“Worms,” Chat says instantly. “She has worms, but I brought medicine for that, I thought she might. She has broken ribs, too. And her cuts hurt, but they’re not infected, I don’t think. And one of her feet was broken and it’s fixed now, but it still hurts to walk for long distances, so you need to be careful. And one of her teeth is rotting and should be pulled. And—”

“Conference room,” Darcy says. “Go in the conference room. I’m going to meet with Marisol. Foggy can deal with things out here.”

“She likes you,” Chat tells her, as Rey picks herself up off the floor. “She likes everyone here. But she says that there was another man who took her the first time, where is he?”

Darcy opens her mouth, and shuts it again. She swallows. “He’s, um. He’s in the hospital.” And under arrest, but she’s not entirely sure Chat or Santino need to know that bit. “He can’t take her back, he’s, um. He’s really sick.”

“She’d like to see him, if she can,” Chat says. “She thinks he’s very sad.”

They’ve disappeared into the conference room before Darcy can think of a way to respond.

It’s nostalgic, meeting a client in Mug Shots. She hasn’t been here in a while, just because the whole world has been completely insane in regards to schedules, and time, and bruises, and just…everything, so when she walks in there are people behind the counter that she doesn’t recognize, and new things on the menu that she hasn’t heard of. Darcy rubs her hands over her face, careful of the cut and the bruising and her nose, and then orders the cheapest thing she’ll still be able to stomach before settling in the window, two tables down from the one she’d used when James Wesley had wandered into her café and told her _If I didn’t know better, I’d say you know who he is._ She’s never used that table again, even when it’s open. She just—she can’t. She can’t use that table, she _won’t_ use that table, even if it means standing and drinking her coffee and looking out the window instead of taking the only empty seat in the place. She won’t.

_Karen thought I blamed her._

Christ. Just—Jesus Christ. Fisk’s fucked all of them up. Or more than that. They’re all messed up, somehow, every one of them. A bunch of broken people fitting each other back together. Except Foggy, who grits his teeth and bears it and stands between them and ruin like a sentinel. If she thinks of James Wesley she thinks of glasses being shoved back onto her face; she thinks of a gag in her mouth and the laser target of a sniper rifle bouncing against her chest; she thinks of a card and a job offer and having Karen come into the office and break down in tears because _I killed him, he’s dead_ , and all that had happened afterwards with Fisk. She forgets sometimes that as close as she’s come to killing people, as close as both she _and_ Matt have come, especially in the past few days, Karen’s the only one of them who’s actually, deliberately pulled the trigger.

It’s no wonder, Darcy realizes, curling her hands around her mug and setting her computer up on the tabletop, that Karen is so fixated on Frank Castle. Not as a person, but—she’s not sure. _Punishment,_ the DA had called it, everything he’s done. _The Punisher._ And she might not agree with his methods, but she can’t say that she doesn’t understand it. She can’t say she doesn’t know what it feels like to have your family die in front of you, and not be able to stop it, to go completely screaming hollow, to fall in silence into a black hole you can’t crawl out of again. And yeah, Matt wasn’t dead, but she didn’t know that, and the feeling—the feeling isn’t made lesser, for that. She’d tried to kill Oliver Bletchley, and she’d tried to kill Frank Castle, and she can’t say that she doesn’t understand more of him than she wants to, not after all of that.

_Think it’s something in you._

She can’t blame Karen for connecting with it, either. Not after everything. Karen never talks about what happened—she doesn’t want to, and Darcy _gets_ not wanting to, the same way she doesn’t want to talk about Oliver Bletchley with anyone ever again—but it happened, and there are still nights where Karen is the last one out of the office at night and the first one there in the morning and it’s not because she’s trying to get more work done. And now there’s the reveal of the homeless kids, and Santino, and just…all of it. She can’t blame Karen for connecting with Frank Castle and what he’s done on some level, because she can’t blame Karen for something she’s done herself. She hates to think it, but it’s true. It’s the same thing that had her understanding more than a little of Vanessa Marianna, and seeing the inverted reflections of herself and of Matt in Wilson Fisk. They’re all a mess of wants and desires and motivations and mistakes, and somehow they all smash right up against each other’s edges to cut themselves, to bleed. Frank Castle had seen something in her that nobody should ever have been able to see, and Karen’s seeing something in him that she recognizes, and Matt’s seen something too, and just—God. _Why do people have to be complicated?_

“Darcy,” someone says, and she jumps. It’s Marisol. She shifts her sunglasses on her nose, and sits down. “Hi, sorry. My phone has been doing ridiculous things lately. It won’t accept or send any calls at all, and there’s no sound to it, and just—I need a new one, is all. It’s why I had Kalia call you.”

“Oh.” Darcy blinks. _Yank yourself up out of the philosophical deep end, Lewis._ “No, it’s okay. I don’t know what you really wanted to meet about, I only just managed to file yesterday and I haven’t heard anything from the school yet.”

“That’s actually kind of what I wanted to talk to you about.” She’s pressing her purse tight into her stomach. “I wanted to ask if you would be willing to file other suits. I mean, for some of the other people he’s done this to, I guess. Just—other people at the school have heard that I’m doing this, and they’ve been asking me, and so I said I would ask.”

Oh. _Could’ve sent me an email._ “I mean, if they would like to work with Nelson, Murdock, and Lewis to file for injunctive relief against MSM, then they can, it’s up to them. I wouldn’t necessarily have a problem with it. Just—the more people who file, the larger and more complex it’ll get, and the more likely it is that we might have a Fourth Crusade on our hands.” Marisol blinks at her, and Darcy shifts. “Sorry. Fruitless endeavor. It’s a lot of work, is all I’m saying. Maybe if we get more people the school will fold to pressure, instead of fighting one or two little suits, but…hard to say.” 

“Oh.” Marisol’s buzzing, for some reason. She hasn’t looked away from Darcy’s face. “I don’t know, I was just—I was wondering, that’s all.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” She bounces her leg up and down. “Just been a long couple of days.”

“Yeah, no. For me too.”

Marisol shifts her sunglasses on her nose again, and then takes them off, folding them up in her hand. Her hair’s tied back today, into a ponytail, and her hoop earrings are so big that they could probably fit around her wrists along with the bracelets. “If I were to bring you more people, would you be willing to talk to them? I know we talked about how generally with cases like this the lawyers get refunded by the courts, which is good because a lot of them are students and they probably wouldn’t be able to afford the rates, but I was just—”

“If you do want to bring people, that’s all right with me.” She’ll take drop-dead exhaustion over bankruptcy any day. “Just—are you okay? Did the school say something to you?”

“What?” Marisol stops bouncing. “No, the school didn’t do anything, I’m fine. I’m just—I’m thinking really fast, I guess, that’s all.”

“If you’re sure that everything’s all right—”

“Everything’s fine,” says Marisol. “Just a long few days. How’d you get the cut?”

Darcy blinks. “What?”

“I mean, you said—you said the nose was a boxing accident, what happened to your cheek?” Her eyes dip. “And your hand.”

“Oh.” Something very cold and slimy starts to creep up Darcy’s back. She looks down at her coffee, and then up at Marisol again, and closes her computer. “Why do you ask?”

“Just kind of beat up for a defense attorney, that’s all. Should I be asking if the school came to talk to you, or is there like—some other case you’re working on that’s getting violent, or something?”

“I can’t talk about cases with a client,” says Darcy. “Except yours, obviously. Active or otherwise.”

“Oh, well, obviously.” Her nails are painted cherry red, and when she waves a hand through the air in dismissal it’s like watching blood fly. “I didn’t mean to pry, I don’t know. Just—I know that your firm does a lot of work with like…risky cases.”

“Risky cases?”

“I saw the article framed up in your office. You’re the firm that brought down Wilson Fisk last year. You guys were the ones to file the suits, you know, when everyone else was letting him stomp all over them and do all the things he was doing.” She leans forward. “I mean, you _are_ the same Lewis, right? The one that the Goodmans hired some guy to beat up in an alleyway?”

“Well, I mean—yes.” And she doesn’t like that that’s a piece of information that floats around, really, but it’s kind of hard for it not to be after Ben Urich’s articles and the _Bulletin_ and Kate’s TMZ interview and every other major newspaper in the city had picked up on Fisk and his strong-arm game. She’d really rather not be known as _the lawyer who had the crap kicked out of her in an alleyway._ She’ll even take _the one that rips your throat out with her teeth_ over the damsel in distress bullshit. “You’re not wrong, no, but just—why are you asking?”

“Clarification,” says Marisol. “Just—I was fairly certain, when the woman at the courthouse told me your name, but I wasn’t positive until I came in to your office the first time. I’ve been asking around since then, and I’ve heard a lot of contradictory things.” She rests her sunglasses on the table. “The DA’s office isn’t particularly fond of you guys, is it? First you knock half the corrupt ADAs out of the ballpark with blowing the whistle on Fisk, and now you have Reyes herself spreading the rumors that you guys have been playing fast and loose with procedure and nearly ruining some kind of sting operation they set up with the police department.”

 _That fucking weasel._ “Doesn’t seem to be making you too uncomfortable.”

“I’ve done my homework.” Marisol starts twisting her bracelets again. “Anyone with a brain and access to Google has heard of all the scandals that have come out of Samantha Reyes’s DA’s Office. I’m new to the city, but I’m not stupid. From what I can tell it’s far more likely that it’s Reyes covering her ass again. Besides, I’m a musician, not an attorney. I’m far more interested in the idea of working with the firm that took down Wilson Fisk than I am whatever gossip is floating around the Supreme Court. You guys might be unorthodox, but you seem to get results.”

“Yeah, well, you might be the only one in the city who thinks that.” She’s going to have to go to the courthouse, isn’t she? Christ. She doesn’t _want_ to go to court tomorrow. She doesn’t want to have to deal with the bullshit. “Thanks, though, for the vote of confidence.”

“So, is that how you hurt your face?” Marisol props her chin in one hand. “Did someone else beat you up in an alleyway?”

“I can promise you that there is no way I’m ever getting beat up in an alleyway like that again,” Darcy says. She only realizes she’s hooked hair behind her ear with her scarred hand when Marisol’s eyes snap to the mark, and stick there.  “And I’m—I’m really not all that comfortable talking about this, Marisol, truly. It’s not something I like to remember. At all. Ever. Even while inebriated.”

“No, of course.” Marisol watches as Darcy slips her computer back into her bag. “I was just—I was curious, that’s all. I wasn’t in the city at the time, but like I said, I did research. I read a lot about the Fisk trial and everything online. Just—I knew it coming in, but I couldn’t reconcile it until just now. It’s just—I’m interested, that’s all.”

If this is hero worship, this is the oddest case of it Darcy’s ever seen. It’s making the muscles in her legs get all twitchy. “Same Lewis. Born that way, unfortunately. I stick my nose into dangerous places. Was there anything else you wanted to talk about, or—”

“Not really,” says Marisol. She’s still staring. Darcy’s halfway up out of her chair and her bag’s on her shoulder when she says, “Actually, wait. Just—one second, wait.”

“Is someone else coming about the MSM thing?”

“No, just—” Marisol collects her mug, and holds tight to it with both hands. “I just—I told you I grew up on a reservation, right? I told you about my parents.”

What the hell is going on here? All the hair on her body’s standing on end. It’s as if someone’s turned on a foghorn, right in her ear, and set it to _listen up, stupid_ volume. “Marisol—”

“I didn’t—I did grow up on a reservation. At least, for a little while. And my mother was from Mexico. But I’m not Tohono O’odham, I’m Cheyenne. I only lived in Arizona after the Guerras took me in. I was born in Montana.”

What the actual fuck. “Marisol, I really don’t—”

“I don’t tell people where I’m from for the same reason I don’t tell people my real name.” Marisol glances at the counter, at the window, and then leans in. “My father was murdered when I was nine years old.”

 _Christ._ Darcy glances at the door, and then sinks slowly back into her chair, settling her bag over her knees and keeping her mouth shut. Marisol turns, and stares at the wall for a little bit, pressing her lips together. (And seriously, her lipstick game is still on point, and it’s kind of irritating to be honest.) “I found the body,” she says. “He was—he was beaten up, executed. The police thought it was some kind of punishment, at the time. For something he’d done.”

Fucking hell. One or two details different, and this story could be Matt’s. One or two things shifted, and this could be Jack Murdock they’re talking about, and not Marisol Guerra’s father, and just—she can’t handle this right now. “Marisol, I don’t—”

“My father did things for people,” says Marisol. “He cleaned things up. I didn’t know at the time what kind of work he did, only that he’d go away for days and days sometimes. That time he was gone for a week, which wasn’t unusual, but when he came back, he was—he was scared.” She blinks, very slowly, and then turns to look at Darcy again. Her eyes are dry. “After he was killed, I was placed with a family named the Guerras. We lived in Arizona for a few years, and I went back there for college, so I wasn’t—I wasn’t lying, exactly, I just…wasn’t telling the full truth.”

“What about your mom?”

Marisol shakes her head. “She had cancer, she died when I was two.”

“So Guerra isn’t your name.”

“No, it is.” She presses her fingers to her lips. “The last thing my father said to me before he died was to be careful, to watch my back. He thought—I don’t know. That someone might come after me. When the Guerras took me in, they had my name legally changed just in case someone did. I don’t know if anyone ever has, but I’ve kept my head down for fifteen years, moved across the country. If someone _was_ looking for me they’d have had a hard time of it.”

Darcy shakes her head. “Why are you telling me this? You barely know me, and this doesn’t—” She stops. “This is why you decided to go with our firm, wasn’t it? Because of everything that happened with Fisk.”

“I won’t lie and say it wasn’t a deciding factor in dropping Lawrence Cranston.” Marisol shrugs. “Though he was tremendously irritating and sexist, so I would have fired him regardless. I didn’t tell you before because I wasn’t certain whether or not I could trust you. My father died because he used to fix things for people in New York City, he’d—his name is attached to half a dozen cold cases with the NYPD, more, even. I had to be sure that you were clean before I told you the truth.” 

“So the case with the Manhattan School of Music—”

“That’s true. That did happen, and I do want to keep going with the suit, I think we should. The case wasn’t an excuse, just—just circumstances.”

Her mouth is very dry. Darcy fumbles her coffee mug up to her lips, and doesn’t look at Marisol for a long time. “I don’t understand what you want.”

“You know Lilith and Daredevil,” says Marisol.

 _Shit._ Shit fuck shit. “I don’t.”

“You do. You have to, I’m sure of it. I told you, I’ve read everything there is to know about the Fisk case that’s available to the public, I’ve read every—every trash magazine, I’ve gone through every online messageboard and all the sightings and every goddamn tweet about the pair of them, and you _have_ to know them. There’s no way you would have survived Fisk otherwise. That’s a horrible thing to say, but—but it’s true, isn’t it, that you would be dead now if not for Daredevil and Lilith?”

It’s true, in a lot of ways, but just—holy shit. “Marisol, I really don’t think this is a good idea.”

“I’ve studied everything I can get my hands on.” Marisol doesn’t seem to be listening. “I’ve studied _everything,_ Darcy, every part of it, or every part that I have access to as a civilian. And if you look at it, it’s obvious. There’s no way Nelson, Murdock, and Lewis would have been able to come out of what happened with Wilson Fisk as clean as you did if you didn’t have help. And there’s no _way_ they would have managed to get as far as they did without someone on the outside.”

Darcy bristles, because she has to. “I don’t know what you’re accusing me of—”

“I need to talk to them,” Marisol says. “You’re the only way I can think of. You’re the only hope I have of getting in touch with them.”

“Have you tried Twitter? I think I heard somewhere that Lilith has an account.”

“And you think they’d take a tweet seriously? I’m not about to bandy my father’s murder all over the internet in the hope that it _might_ attract their attention.”

She shakes her head. “What makes you think they can help you? It happened fifteen years ago, in a completely different state, it’s not like—”

“They know New York,” says Marisol simply, and _dammit, I’ve shot myself in the foot, now, haven’t I?_ “It might have happened fifteen years ago, and that’s decades in the criminal underworld, but they can find people, they can—they can make people talk that I can’t even begin to get near. I need their help, and you’re my only lead to finding them.”

“Marisol—”

“I know you met Daredevil in that alley when the Goodmans had you attacked.” Marisol rocks forward in her chair, fists her hands up on the table. “I know you met Daredevil, and you had to have met Lilith somehow, I don’t know, maybe she found you when Daredevil went dark, but you _know_ them. I have to talk to them. I can’t take no for an answer.”

 “Marisol, seriously.” Her heart’s beating very fast. “I _can’t._ ”

“I need to talk to them.”

“You’re not listening to me, I don’t—I’m not some Magic Eight Ball that you can shake and get a phone number for vigilantes, okay, I can’t help you—”

“My father _died,_ ” Marisol snaps. “I was nine and I walked in and I found my father dying on the floor with a hole in his chest and half the bones in his body shattered with bats. He wiped his blood on my face and he told me to run and I have never, ever forgotten that, but I’m done with running away from what happened. I need to understand. My father might not have been a good man, Miss Lewis, but he was my father, and he was murdered, and whoever killed him is in New York somewhere. I need Daredevil and Lilith to help me find out where.”

“I get that,” Darcy says. “Believe me, you have—you have _no_ idea how much I can understand that, Marisol, but seriously, _I don’t know who they are._ If I could help you, I would, but I can’t. I can’t help you with something like this. I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

Marisol fists her hands up on the table, and looks at her. Her eyes flick over Darcy’s face, over the cut and the bruises, and her mouth creases. Then she stands. “His name was Willie Lincoln,” she says. “My father. They wrote about the murder in the local paper, you should be able to find it in the backlogs of the website.” She takes a breath. “And—and you’ll be able to access his records from the NYPD. Just so you know. If you happen to come across them, you can tell them that.”

“I don’t know them, Marisol.”

“You’re not a very good liar, Miss Lewis,” says Marisol. “Tell them about him. Maybe let them decide if they’re going to help me or not.” She heaves her bag over her shoulder. “I’ll let you know if anyone else at MSM wants to talk to you about the suit.”

She’s gone before Darcy can speak, slamming out the door and vanishing into the New York crowds. Behind the counter, one of the baristas sucks her teeth.

“Bad date, honey?” she says, when she collects the mug from Darcy’s table. She’s still sitting there with her bag in her lap, staring hard at the tabletop, her brain kind of just…stopped. Frozen in carbonite. She’s not sure. Darcy blinks at her, and shakes her head.

“Just, uh. The universe needs to chill with all the things it’s throwing at me.”

“Pretty sure everyone feels like that, sometimes,” says the barista, and pats her back soothingly before wandering back to the counter again. Really, she thinks, there isn’t anything else that has to be said.

.

.

.

_To: questions@theurichreport.com_

_From: rdglo329@freenet.co.uk_

_Subject: Frank Castle_

You need to look into what Reyes did to Frank Castle. If you don’t hurry then there’s not going to be anything left for you to blow the whistle on. She’s good at cleaning up her messes. 

_To: rdglo329@freenet.co.uk_

_From: questions@theurichreport.com_

_Subject: re: Frank Castle_

Thought you weren’t going to contact me again. This seems strikingly similar to contact.

_To: questions@theurichreport.com_

_From: rdglo329@freenet.co.uk_

_Subject: re: re: Frank Castle_

If you don’t post something soon then she’ll have the whole thing tied up with a bow and nobody’s going to know the truth.

 

_To: rdglo329@freenet.co.uk_

_From: questions@theurichreport.com_

_Subject: re: re: re: Frank Castle_

We should talk about this in person. You’re lucky I know someone who can encrypt emails.

 

_To: questions@theurichreport.com_

_From: rdglo329@freenet.co.uk_

_Subject: re: re: re: re: Frank Castle_

_Attached: scan90322.jpeg_

You’re running out of time.

.

.

.

It’s not hard to find. Willie Lincoln. Found dead in his home in Lame Deer, Montana, April 17, 2001. Murder never solved. Outlived by one daughter, nine, unnamed. Predeceased by partner Anita Lopez, leukemia. Recently returned from a business trip to New York City. Worked as a financial advisor. _The last financial advisor I met was Leland Owlsley, and he was about as legit a financial advisor as Donald Trump is a person._ The tribal police who had looked into it had dismissed it as a break-in gone wrong, and the article in the paper announcing it doesn’t have any details to contradict it. Still, something lingers. A vague aftertaste, smog hanging in the back of her throat. _Something’s wrong here._ A financial advisor in Lame Deer, Montana making frequent trips out to New York City? No. Especially not considering what Marisol had said, which, even if it isn’t the truth, still begs the question: _why did Willie Lincoln die?_

 _You’re letting this get to you,_ she tells herself, as she leaves Mug Shots an hour later than expected and starts off down the road. _You shouldn’t let this distract you. A fifteen-year-old murder doesn’t have anything on what’s happening in the now._ Compared to the gangs that are still going wild, the capture of Frank Castle and all the other shit that goes on in this city on a daily basis, a fifteen-year-old murder is the last thing that she needs to think about right now. In all likelihood Lincoln had been working for Rigoletto or the Maggia, a cleaner and a fixer they called in when they didn’t want someone local, and he’d been killed for messing up or stealing or doing whatever it is that fixers do when they get too greedy or get in too deep. But the look on Marisol’s face…damn it. _You’re letting this get to you, you’re being too soft. Seriously, this case is fifteen years old._

But there’s no statue of limitations on murder.

_Wasn’t even in New York, it was out in Montana, and more than that it was on a reservation, it’d be tribal jurisdiction and possibly also federal and not something you can poke your nose into._

Goddammit. She doesn’t like mysteries. She can’t _stand_ mysteries. And even if this one is fifteen years old, it’s still a mystery, and it’s still something that happened in New York, and it’s still haunting Marisol Guerra. _Come on, Darcy, think it through._ The likelihood of the guy who killed Willie Lincoln actually being in New York, still, nearly two decades later? Small. The likelihood of her tracking him down? Infinitesimal. The likelihood of anything actually coming of it? Excruciatingly tiny. But the look on her face—goddammit.

 _He was my father and he was murdered,_ she’d said, and _ah, shit, I’m going to look into it, aren’t I?_

Brett’s behind the front desk when she walks in to the 15th Precinct. It’s like clockwork, she thinks. She walks in, Brett’s at the counter. Brett looks up, gets a look on his face like he’s just been pepper-sprayed, and goes to gulp coffee to put his stoic cop face back on. It’s rhythmic and familiar and it’s kind of great that it still happens, because it might make her a bit of a sadist, but she kind of enjoys annoying Brett Mahoney. Makes up for him being a shit three-week sex partner. (The sex hadn’t been shit, just…she and Brett hadn’t managed to get along too well outside of it, is all.) “What happened to your face, there, Lewis? Thorn bush decide it didn’t like you?”

 _Why’d you have to mention thorns?_ She’s had enough of that talk, lately. “Bike accident.”

“Getting in a lot of bike accidents.” Brett’s eyes narrow. “Something you want to tell me? Last time you looked like this we had federal agents coming through taking away half our officers in cuffs, no thanks to Wilson Fisk.”

“Nah, it’s nothing. Bikes just don’t like me. String of bad luck, is all.” She cocks her head. “What’s with the smug look, my brettanical garden? You look like a cat who has inhaled a whole wall full of mice.”

Well, he did. Now he looks like he’s in actual physical pain. “Please don’t call me that. They just keep getting worse, the names. I would have thought you’d run out of options by now.”

“Not my fault your name is so completely amendable, mon bretit chou.” Darcy raps her knuckles on the desk. “Heard about the Castle collar. Good for you.”

“Just followed a tip,” Brett says, but he looks pleased, so she’s hit the nail on the head. “Only doing my job, Lewis, as you know.”

“Yeah, well, they’d be stupid not to promote you, snag like that.”

“I’m just glad he’s off the streets again.” Brett makes a face. “Don’t know how to feel about half the vigilantes running around the city nowadays. Make it damn hard to be a cop sometimes.”

“You know my opinion on cops. Half the time I’m in here it’s because some jackass in a blue uniform wound up getting a little too happy with his nightstick and breaking some poor kid’s arm.”

“And by _poor kid_ you mean _‘banger._ ”

“Yeah, that’s exactly what I mean, especially because I think the last one was like twelve.”

Brett grimaces. “That was a shitshow, I’ll give you that one. Still don’t agree with you, but there it is. What do you want?”

“Two things, actually. First off—I have a new client, racial discrimination thing, but she just—she said something that kind of freaked me out a little bit. Have you ever heard of a guy named Willie Lincoln? Before our time, maybe fifteen years ago. Wasn’t a New Yorker, but from the sound of it he did some work here that would not have made him many friends.”

Brett sucks his teeth, and leans away from the desk. “Willie Lincoln? No. Guy you would’ve talked to about stuff that happened fifteen years ago is dead, though. Oscar Clemons. Mind like a steel trap.”

“Unless you can raise the dead and you’ve been lying to me all these years, Brettcromancer, I really don’t think it matters what kind of mind Clemons did or did not have. He’s dead and he was murdered and the bastard who did it is still out there, and that’s…kind of more important.”

“Simmer down, Lewis.”

Darcy scowls at him. “Don’t tell me to simmer down, Sergeant Tibbs. You know how I feel about people telling me to simmer down. As in, when people tell me to simmer down, I’m always tempted to do the exact opposite and boil over, and that’s not ever a good thing.”

“You never do anything by halves, do you,” says Brett, exasperatedly. “And some people still get surprised that you and Murdock wound up being a thing.”

“People get surprised about a lot of things that should be obvious.” Darcy pops the knuckles on her good hand, and starts scraping her nail into the scar on her palm, over and over. It’s turning into a nervous habit, and she’s not sure how she feels about it. “C’mon, Brettigan. I’m just looking to see if you guys have any information about Willie Lincoln, that’s all. I know you can look that up on your computer, maybe get some copies for me?”

“Fifteen years is a long time. Might be that some of the files were lost in the Incident.”

“Yeah, you and every other big bureaucratic sinkhole in Hell’s Kitchen lost files, I get it, just—will you check? I know it was a long time ago, but there isn’t a statute of limitations on murder.”

That has him hitting the brakes, at least. “You think he was murdered?”

“I know Lincoln was murdered. I want to know if he was a murderer too, that’s all. If you can manage it.” Darcy knocks on the desk again. “I’m willing to wait, seriously. Anything you can get for me on this guy. I’d appreciate it.”

He sighs through his nose. “This isn’t for a case, is it? This is just you poking around.”

“Don’t give me any guff, man, just tell me yes or no.”

“You owe me for this,” he says.

“I shower honor on your whole family, Sergeant Mahoney.”

“Yeah, sure, whatever.” He whacks the space bar a few times to wake the computer up. “What’s the other oh-so-rational favor?”

“Uh, that’s—a little more complicated, actually. But more relevant, after Grotto.” She hesitates. “I want anything you can get me on Finn Brannigan.”

Brett stops dead, staring at her. “Finn Brannigan,” he says. “That’s not for some fifteen year old murder, is it.”

“Not…exactly, no.”

She’s pretty sure Brett wants to take her by the shoulders and shake her until her teeth clack together. “What the hell are you getting into this time, Darcy?”

“Wow.” She tries for _flip_ , ends up somewhere east of _nervous._ “My first name. Must be some interesting stuff in those files.”

Brett looks one way, then the other. He steps away from his desk. “Come,” he says, “with me, now,” and before she can speak he’s seized her elbow and hustled her into the precinct, through the gate, down the hall, and into the observation area of an empty interrogation room. She wrenches away, and rolls her shoulder, trying not to wince, as Brett locks the door and shuts off the lights.

“Christ, Brett, could’ve asked nicely before frogmarching me—”

“The fuck do you think you’re doing?” Brett snaps. “Fifteen year old murders, Lewis, that’s one thing, that’s something I can understand you sticking your nose into, but _Finn Brannigan_ —Christ.”

“You know him?”

“My mom told me stories.” He looks at the door, at the broken camera on the table. “Know the shit that used to happen, when he was in town?”

“I’ve seen the headlines.” Darcy cracks her knuckles again. “ _Smiling Finn,_ yeah?”

“You know why they called him that?” He rolls right over her, doesn’t wait for an answer. “When people crossed Finn Brannigan, they turned up with new mouths. In their necks. Cops used to call it _Finn’s Grin_ , he’d cut so deep. Heads would come off, half the time. And that was _after_ he beat the shit out of them. Drills, knives, needles, bullets. Your guy Fisk, he was quiet, he was careful—”

“Unless he was cutting the heads off of Russians.”

“Yeah, well, Finn was like that all the time. Wild, violent. But cold. People would always comment on that, the few that survived seeing him in a temper. Vicious as all hell. Take your nose off if you crossed him. But just—frozen solid, when he did it.” He folds his arms over his chest. “Why the hell do you want to know anything about Finn Brannigan?”

“You heard about Grotto.”

“Yeah, and he’s in a coma. So either you’re just curious, or there’s something you’re not telling me.”

 _Please, please, Brett, just—pick if you’re going to be a good cop or an awful cop. Please pick something, because I can’t deal with you not noticing obvious things and picking up on tiny things all the fucking time, it’s so inconvenient, holy shit_ — “Look.” It’s a long and torturous battle not to pinch the bridge of her nose. “Grotto might be in a coma, but he’s a Brannigan, he’s one of the Kitchen Irish, and if Brannigan’s smart enough not to get caught after years and years of being _Smiling Finn,_ he’s probably going to do the not-stupid thing of coming back to New York to rebuild his family now that Frank Castle’s in custody. And if he’s coming back, and if Grotto wakes up—”

“Lot of ifs in there, Lewis.”

“I don’t have another reason for you! If it’s not good enough—”

“No, your reason’s fine. Reason makes sense. It’s just bullshit.” He snags her elbow again when she tries to push by, squeezes hard. “Tell me the _truth_ , Darcy. Because the last time you tried getting involved in something like this, the last time you poked your nose in, you were kidnapped, and tortured, and you nearly died, and I’m not letting it happen again.”

“Wow,” she says, after a moment. “You actually do care.”

“You’re a pain in the ass.” Brett digs his fingers into her arm, right into her bruises, and she has to bite her tongue to keep from yelping. “None of us want that happening again. And with Finn Brannigan? You wouldn’t come back whole. So tell me. Give me a reason.”

What can she actually say? _Actually, I’m Lilith, and I can’t get my hands on that paperwork illegally because I’m not that much of an idiot, so it’d really just be easier if you handed them over or like…let me sign them out like a good little vigilante?_ “I can’t,” Darcy says, shortly. “I just—if you won’t give me the files, I’ll find out some other way, I just need the information, Brett.”

“For _what_?”

“Forget it.” She waves a hand. “It doesn’t—I’ll figure it out, forget I even asked.”

“You don’t get to ask me shit like that and then not tell me _why_.”

“Let me out of this room, Brett.”

“No.” Brett steps in front of her. “Darcy, stop—”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“ _Can’t_.”

“Shit,” Brett says, and lowers his voice. “Is this—are you working with _them_?”

This is absurd. She’d laugh, if she could manage it, laugh and laugh and laugh, because he sounds like a middle school student talking about playground royalty, longing and furious all at once. “Who are you talking about?”

“Them,” he says again. “Daredevil and Lilith. And Hawkeye. This is for them, isn’t it?”

“Why does _everyone_ think I have their private phone number? That’s totally what I do on the weekend, I text Daredevil and Lilith and Hawkeye and hang out with them and get bubble tea. Hawkeye’s allergic to lychee, did you know that?”

“Stop fucking around,” Brett snaps. “Is this something you’re doing for them? Do you work with them now? Do you feel like you owe them for saving your life, because Darcy—”

“Christ.” Her armies are wrecked, and the urge is too powerful. She rubs at her eyes. “It isn’t for them, Brett. This has nothing to do with them.”

“Don’t lie to me, Lewis. Daredevil rescued you last year, I know you know him and I know he knows you, you didn’t see him before he found you—”

“You did?”

“Caught me near that tenement where you were grabbed. I’ve only met the guy a few times, but he seemed—” Brett waffles. “For a guy who pulls on a leather suit and a mask and goes around cracking skulls, he seemed freaked when he couldn’t find you. And I thought it was because he’d met you once or twice, because you were innocent, but if you’re still working with him—”

“I’m—”

“Shut up.”

“ _Don’t tell me to shut up._ ” She shoves away from him. “I’m not working with any of them, Brett, Jesus—”

“If you were—”

“Get out of the way—”

“ _I want to help_ ,” Brett hisses, and then shuts up. His lips go thin. Darcy stops dead, and stares at him.

“What?”

“Look.” He looks back at the door. “Look, I don’t like any of them. I think they’re a problem, I think they should be behind bars, I think they’re spitting on the uniform and that they’re making the police department look like Scully and Hitchcock from _Brooklyn 99—_ ”

“Wait, when did you start watching popular TV?”

“Would you _quit_?” he says, with the _God, why is this my life, why do I know you_ look on his face again. “But they grabbed Fisk when no one else could manage it. They grabbed Fisk, they grabbed Castle, and they’ve been keeping people alive when we can’t do anything, and if Finn Brannigan’s back in town, then—” Brett stares hard at the wall. “They ought to know what they’re going up against. So if you’re doing this to try and help them, then—then tell me, and I’ll do what I can.”

Her shoulder hurts. Darcy digs her thumbnail into the scar on her hand, and Brett sees it, not just seeing but _seeing_ , the scar and the bad habit and the nervousness. She stares at the wall. _If I bring in Brett—what?_ He could notice. He’d probably realize that there were discrepancies, that she comes in more beat up and more bruised than she ever did before, that there are convenient disappearing acts she pulls when she has something to do as Lilith and marks from Daredevil’s helmet on Matt’s cheekbones that they can never quite hide. _If I’m careful, if I send Foggy or Kate_ —but Foggy would flip a shit, and Kate would be too obvious, as Hawkeye, she’s cocky and barely wears a mask and she’s open about her archery, about all of it, and Brett’s blind to Matt but he’s not stupid, he’d pick that up—but the _files_ —

“You just meet with me,” she says, in a low voice. “And I’m not telling you anything about either of them.”

“I don’t want to _know_ anything about either of them. Any of them. I don’t want to know that _you_ know anything about any of them.” Brett taps his forefinger to the butt of his gun. “To be clear: you ask me questions. I get you information when I can. We don’t talk about them, you don’t tell anyone I’m doing this—”

And another lie to add to the pile. “Of course.”

“—and you _don’t_ go poking around anywhere near Finn Brannigan, Darcy. You keep your reckless attorney nose out of the Kitchen Irish, you hear me? Even if that scumbag Grotto does wake up. The three of you, you and Foggy and Murdock, you stay as far away from them as possible.”

“Brett—”

“ _Promise me_ ,” he says, and Darcy swallows. “I don’t care what else you do. Just stay away from Finn Brannigan. Swear.”

She may, possibly, be the worst person in the world for doing this. “I swear,” she says, and sticks out her hand. Scarred, not bandaged. “I, Darcy Lewis, will stay as far away from Finn Brannigan and the Kitchen Irish as I can get.”

Brett looks at her hand, at the scar on her palm. Then he reaches out, and shakes her hand twice, awkward as it is with two righties doing a left-handed shake. He looks at the dead camera again, and then steps away.

“I’m going to get the files,” he says. “Wait five minutes, and then head back out to the waiting area again. If you have questions, call, don’t come in. You can’t be seen in here more often than normal.”

“I know that much, Brett.” She waggles her fingers. “Ain’t my first rodeo.”

“Don’t tell me that shit,” Brett says, exhausted, and leaves the room. When he shuts the door, she’s been left behind in the dark.

 

She’s walking back with six files under her arm—two for Finn Brannigan, three for Willie Lincoln, and one unsolved murder that Brett had thought Daredevil and Lilith might want to pay attention to—when her phone rings. _Matt_ , is her first instinct, _please let it be Matt,_ but the screen reads _Unknown Number_. Marisol, she thinks, maybe. She’d mentioned she was going to tell other people to contact them about MSM, probably handed out Darcy’s cell number instead of the firm’s, which, whatever. She hits accept. “This is Darcy Lewis speaking.”

“Wonderful. I’d wondered if I had the right number. It took me a little while to get the information out of your secretary; is the whole firm as protective as she is, or is it just…little Miss Page being special?”

This is not a good day. This just isn’t a good _week._ Darcy comes to a stop in the middle of the sidewalk, and someone clips her shoulder hard with theirs. “Watch it, asshole!”

“Was that at me?” Elektra sounds delighted. “How crass.”

“No, um. I’m walking.” She scoots into an alley. “Elektra, um. Hi. Can I help you with something?”

“I was just calling to get an idea of where your heads were at. I mean, the bank contacted me to let me know that the deposit was refunded, which—that’s a shame, it seems to me that your little business could have used something to pull it out of the red.” Elektra hums a little. “Your loss. If you didn’t want to keep it, you could have just said something.”

“We’d rather be paid for actually doing work,” says Darcy. “Which, since we didn’t take the job, we wouldn’t have felt comfortable accepting monetary compensation for it.”

“Is _we_ in this circumstance the firm in general, or—”

“The firm. Collectively. Meaning all three of us, before you ask.”

“I see.”

 _I really get the feeling you don’t._ Darcy leans hard against the concrete wall of the next building over. A Laundromat, she thinks. She can hear coins and dryers. “What are you calling for, Elektra? I’m in the middle of something, and I already told you no lunch.”

“Are you sure? There’s a lovely place off of Fifth Ave that does Bengali food. I seem to remember you like it, but I could be wrong. We only spoke a few times.” Elektra sighs. “More’s the pity. I’m getting the feeling that there’s always been a little more to you than I thought, originally.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“The trick Matthew was pulling with the Roxxon meeting? Cute. Was it your idea he eavesdrop, or his?”

Ah, shit. _How the hell did she catch him?_ Matt probably wouldn’t even have been in the building, so unless she has eyes like a raptor—wait. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t play with me, dear, I know you know what he can do. You might not have, back then, but you do now. It’s not difficult to tell. You move around him differently than you used to, you know. I remember you used to be much more careful of where he is in space.”

 _Elektra knows?_ Darcy swallows hard. _Well. That’s. Well. Okay._ “It is not at _all_ unsettling that you used to watch how I move around people.”

“Oh, come on,” Elektra says, and laughs. It’s more like a snarl. “You have an eye like I do, Darcy. You like understanding how people work, you like watching them. You babble and you chirp and you say the most inane, silly things, and the whole time you’re thinking at a hundred kilometers a minute, trying to work out everyone’s little habits, all their quirks. It drives you crazy not to understand things, especially people. It’s not a hobby, it’s an instinct. Don’t pretend otherwise.”

Out on the street, there’s a man wearing a hot dog suit trying to pass out coupons for a sandwich restaurant. A swarm of insects has spawned under her ribs, buzzing and flaring like locusts. _I really, really don’t like it when people try to pick me apart._ “So you called me to talk about my instincts as a human being?”

“Not exactly, no,” she says. “He didn’t tell you that I knew about his little gift, did he? I’m not sure I expected it, really, but that’s still a little surprising. I thought you two were close.”

She will not snap. She _will_ not snap at such an obvious hook, because goddamn, that’s some _tease the cat until she bites_ stuff if she’s ever heard it. Darcy digs her fingernails into her palm, hard enough to sting. “I never figured you would be the one to pull the passive-aggressive ex-girlfriend crap, Elektra. You were always way too upfront for the catty bullshit people like to make women think they need to get into over men.”

“No, you’re right, I’m not.” Elektra sighs. “I didn’t mean it as an attack, truly. I was just surprised. It seems like rather a large hole in the patchwork, as it were.”

She rolls her eyes up to the sky. “What do you want?”

“I want what’s mine,” Elektra says. “I’m assuming Matthew told you about why I’m in New York. Roxxon has decided to screw with me, and I’m not fond of the idea. But since he’s flat-out refused to help me. I’m wondering if you would.”

“I’ve generally found that it’s a good business practice to not pick up a partner’s rejects,” Darcy says. “And this has nothing to do with the history, Elektra, or what the situation is now. What you were asking for was actually impossible, especially on the time limit you delivered. Besides, I have a full case load at the moment.”

“Of course you do. More indigent nursemaids and drunken bartenders, I suppose.” There’s a soft musical chatter on Elektra’s end of the line, something that Darcy thinks might be jazz. She’s not sure. “Ah, well. Worth a try. But are you really sure you’re going to turn down the lunch? It’s very good curry.”

“I really don’t think that’s the best idea.” Darcy rubs at her eyes. “Look, I get that you might have a problem with me, and I can understand why, but whatever happened with you and Matt—”

“I don’t have a problem with you, personally,” Elektra says. “I quite liked you, actually. You never did manage to get the hang of double-speak. It was refreshing.”

“I think that’s an insult, but I’m not entirely sure, so I’m gonna ignore it.”

“No, it’s the truth,” Elektra says. “Funnily enough. I’m still quite serious about the lunch, though. I feel like there might be a few things we need to talk about. I think we might have something in common.”

“Seriously, I don’t—”

“Lilith,” says Elektra. “For example.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know the last few chapters have been ALL THE ANGST (which, I mean, I blame this season for entirely; like I've said in previous notes, 90mph to 10mph is not my style) but I miss hearing from you guys. ;_; Even if you can just like...say hi. I'm lonely on my little island of words.


	8. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I mentioned this in the edit for last chapter, but in regards to the timeline: basically the writers for DD actually fucked up majorly. There's no possible way that Matt and Elektra could have had a thing ten years ago, if they just graduated law school at the start of S1. So I retconned it to four years ago, stretching from the middle of 1L first semester to spring break for second semester. 
> 
> Content warnings: manipulative behavior, possibly some gaslighting, canon-typical violence, alcohol, meltdowns, PTSD. 
> 
> MILES. AND ELENA. AND MARCI. I'M HAPPY.
> 
> Note! I'm going back to the US for a week or so, which means that this is the last update for like...a week. The next chapter is already done, but I'm not posting it just because I like to have a buffer zone between what y'all are doing, and what I'm doing. I should actually be able to get a decent amount of writing done if I'm lucky, so I might have a buffer of more than a chapter and a half by the time I post again (projecting May 11 or so, possibly a little earlier). This doesn't mean I won't post other things, because I might, depending on muse attacks. Who knows. 
> 
> Time to rework every racist fucking thing about the Hand as best I can. *rolls up sleeves*

The phone rings.

“Nelson, Murdock, and Lewis, how may I help you?”

“It’s me.”

“Ben, hey. I know we said we were gonna meet up to talk about the thing yesterday but I have to—”

“Have you heard from the DA’s Office?”

“Yes,” she says, slowly. “Yeah, um, ADA Tower is in with Foggy right now.”

“Just Nelson?”

“Murdock and Lewis are both off dealing with things,” says Karen. “Ben, is something wrong?”

“I need to show you something,” Ben says. “Meet me at the diner in forty minutes.”

“I don’t—”

“The mole’s back, Karen.”

Karen looks down at the dog at her feet, at Rey’s head on her shoe, at the plant in the corner and the half-shut door of Foggy’s office, the soft murmur of Blake Tower creeping out into the entryway. The empty seats in the waiting room.

_The mole’s back._

“I don’t want to talk about it on this line,” Ben says. “Can you—”

“I’ll be there in thirty. But it can’t be the diner, they don’t allow animals.”

“Animals?”

“I’ll explain when I see you, just—meet me near that living statue in Central Park with the Willy Wonka hat. I think there’s an ice cream vendor near a bench, there, that works as well as anything.”

She hangs up before he can respond. At her feet, Rey heaves a sigh. She’s bony and wretched-looking, and Chat had said something about her feet and how they hurt for long distances and Central Park is a bit too far, but just—she can’t leave this dog. She won’t leave this dog. _Frank Castle is a murderer and he still dragged this dog out of hell,_ and she’s not sure what to make of that but this feels a little like a talisman, doing this, something she’s not sure how to work with but knows is evidence of something Reyes would really rather keep hidden. _Would a sociopathic murderer rescue a dog?_

 _His whole family was killed,_ Darcy had said. _In front of him. His wife, his two kids. Within a day of him coming home._ And he’d nearly died, a bullet to the head and flatlining in the hospital, wrenching himself back up out of the grave. He’d been shot, he’d died and come back, and when he’d woken up, he hadn’t been Frank Castle anymore.

( _Do you really think—_ )

“Come on,” she says, and Rey lifts her head. “Soon as Tower’s gone, I’m taking an early lunch.”

.

.

.

Everything is very loud, all of a sudden. Darcy stands. She stands, and she’s still, because there’s a cacophony in her head, a thousand ringing alarms, all mixing up with the chatter and the smell and the echoes of this alley, of the scream of the door to the Laundromat and the horn of a taxi on the street and the muttered cursewords of a woman in six inch heels stumbling off the curb. Underneath it all there’s her brain, all bells and whistles and fucking klaxons screaming _danger, Will Robinson, danger._ She has to cough to get her mouth to work properly. “Lilith.”

“Yes.” Elektra pauses. “Where are you, at the moment? Only it seems like a bit of a risk, talking about a thing like this if you’re around other people. Or have you not worked that much out yet?”

“You can cut the crap,” Darcy says. “It’s not endearing.”

“Good lord, you sound like him. Which is a little pathetic. I don’t remember you being this straight-laced.” She muses. “Actually, I thought you were a lesbian.”

“I’m bi, but I feel like that’s beside the point. Or like…way out in left field.” Darcy presses her finger into her free ear, trying to listen. “Seriously, everyone today seems to think I have some sort of Batsignal that I use to get one or the other of them to appear on command, it’s really irritating if I’m honest—”

“Don’t be coy, Darcy,” says Elektra, and all the playfulness has dropped away, vanished. The words are honed to cut steel. “You don’t need any sort of signal, and you do know who she is, and who he is, because you _are_ her, and _if I’m honest_ —” she doesn’t spit it, she _drawls_ it, all Southern, and it makes the hair on Darcy’s arms stand up because Christ, that’s her accent reflected perfectly, that’s _her voice_ coming right back at her “—darlin’, you’re really not that slick.”

Her heart’s pounding in her chest. _Jesus Christ._ Jesus Christ stuck on an anthill. With Nestle chocolate or something, who the fuck knows. _Elektra’s guessed._ What the hell is she supposed to do now? “Atlanta doesn’t suit you,” says Darcy finally, and Elektra cracks out a laugh.

“Was that Atlanta? I haven’t been further south than Virginia since I was sixteen; I’m quite out of practice telling them apart.”

“Yeah, because clearly your accent game is the biggest problem you’re dealing with right now.”

Elektra cracks again. “Oh, my dear, are you angry with me for figuring out your little subterfuge? It’s really not all that difficult. Especially once the facts are presented in the right way.”

 _Tip your head,_ Darcy thinks, _tilt it in just the right way, and everything falls into place._ “I seriously don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“We can play this game if you like, but it’ll get boring very quickly. For both of us, I’d imagine.”

 _Breathe, Darcy, think, come on._ “Whatever you’re accusing me of—”

“Oh, it’s not an accusation, it’s a certainty.” She can almost see Elektra preening, see the curl of her fingers around the stem of a wine glass. “I wasn’t sure, before I arrived; it didn’t seem like something that the girl I remember from Columbia would do, pull on a catsuit, walk softly and carry a big stick, but now that certain facts have come to light it’s not surprising. It’s cute, though, that the pair of you thought you would be able to get away with it.”

 _Shit fuck shit hell damn._ Matt’s not going to be happy. Matt’s going to be _furious._ “Certain facts?”

“Histories,” says Elektra. “Personalities. Shifting relationships.” It’s back again, the bruising under the words. _What the hell happened between them?_ This doesn’t seem like just a bad breakup, and if it were...Christ, what the hell even happened? “Besides, even if you _aren’t_ her—which, judging from what I’ve uncovered in the past sixteen hours, is impossible, but for the sake of debate—it’s incredibly difficult for me to believe that you wouldn’t at least know who she is, considering where you live.”

 _You mean who I live with,_ she thinks. “I still don’t have a clue why you would care.”

“Ach. Can we cut the bullshit? We’re both intelligent enough to know exactly what I’m talking about, Darcy. Acting like this is insulting to both of us.”

“I kind of think it’s fun,” Darcy says. “Actually. But seriously, why do you care about her? I thought you came to New York to deal with your father’s business, not play around with half-baked Avengers in leather body suits. Unless there’s something you forgot to mention when you, you know, broke in to the apartment in the middle of the night like some kind of bounty hunter.” She crosses her ankles under the bench. “Wait, do you think Han shot first, or Greedo? Because if it’s Greedo, I don’t think I can talk to you anymore.”

There’s a moment of silence. Then Elektra laughs again, low and rolling, all curling pleasure, a tiger draped in sunlight. “I forgot how entertaining you could be,” she says. “You can tell Matthew about this conversation, or not. I don’t particularly care. _Á bient_ _ôt_.”

She hangs up without another word. Darcy holds the phone to her ear for another ten seconds, easily, staring at the sky and wondering if the drums in the back of her head are going to slow down anytime soon. They don’t. When she finally knocks her head against the wall of the Laundromat, there’s a headache building in the base of her skull.

_Well. That answers the question of whether or not there’s a thread to pull._

Kate texts her about twenty minutes later with a question. Darcy hasn’t moved. She stands there, staring at the brick, listening to the precinct, and tries to keep herself from panicking. _Elektra knows._ This isn’t like Ben knowing, or like Claire or Santino knowing, or any of the rest of it. She _trusts_ Ben and Claire and Santino and Melvin and Betsy to keep their mouths shut about it, to not use the information against her. Hell, Melvin and Betsy don’t even know her name. She’s not sure she can give Elektra the same courtesy, especially considering what she’s done so far. ( _Catch Matt spying. Con my number out of Karen. Break into our apartment. Call me dear. Ask for help._ ) _She plays games,_ Matt had said, and Jesus Christ, this isn’t a game she’s equipped to play. This is so far out of Darcy’s comfort zone that it’s ludicrous, and she really, really, _really_ doesn’t want to be the one to trip the hidden lever and knock the ledge out from under her feet. _Elektra knows._ Jesus. _Elektra knows,_ and if she wanted to splash it all over the world, Darcy wouldn’t be able to stop her.

_Why didn’t he tell me?_

She doesn’t call Matt. Or, well, she does, but she doesn’t call to talk to him. Face-to-face seems the better option for the _hey, so your ex-girlfriend knows we’re vigilantes_ discussion, as much as she’s not looking forward to that. So instead, she goes back to the office. Karen’s missing from the front desk. “She went to meet with Ben,” Foggy says absently, not looking up from his papers, “and Matt hasn’t come back yet, so, you know, persevere. I think I can get this guy to roll over on Marino and the Saint Defiler if I push.”

“Really?”

“Mm. I have a meeting with him tomorrow. And Marino’s actually a paying client, so.”

“You’re a god,” she says. “Do you know when Karen’s coming back?”

“Didn’t say. But the meeting’s with Ben, so I’m assuming it might take a while. She’s doing that hunting dog thing again with her face and the eyes and the nest of newspaper she makes out of her desk. I feel like we should be more worried than we are.” Foggy looks up at her through his lashes. “What’s up?”

“Just—” Is there a point to worrying Foggy before she’s absolutely sure there’s a problem? She bites her lip. “I had some weird news. I need to think, I’ll—I’ll tell you in a bit, okay?”

Foggy watches her. “Is this one of those things you can’t talk about?”

“It’s one of those things I can’t process,” says Darcy simply. “That’s all.”

He hums. “Okie-doke. Can you make coffee before you like…curl into the thinking corner?”

“Am I your maid?”

“No, but you’re the only one I trust enough to ask.” He peeks at her again. “I’ll buy scones tomorrow if you do it.”

“Bribery,” Darcy says, but that’s that. She makes coffee (“Coffee goddess, yes, thank you—”) and then slinks back into her office to text Karen. There’s no response, but since Karen’s with Ben, she didn’t expect one. She messages Kate, too ( _coming in again today, y/n?_ ) and then leaves a message on Matt’s cell (“Hey, um, something happened, I need to talk to you like now, please come home. Or to the office. Or something. Just like…find me as soon as possible.”) before trying to focus on the Willie Lincoln files. It doesn’t work. She reads the same paragraph six times before finally throwing the paperwork aside, and hitting up the gods of Google.

 _Natchios_. There’s nothing on Elektra, not really. She’s in a few photos with her parents, who are very white ( _I didn’t know she was adopted_ ) but she’s never named. There’s a lot more on her dad. Hugo Natchios, old, old money, professor of Macedonian antiquities with Columbia University and Oxford before that. Also the Sorbonne, which, holy shit. Holdings all over the world. Out of the spotlight, for the most part, though the mother did a lot of charity work in Africa. (There are photos on Hugo Natchios’s old website of her with children in Rwanda, which Darcy has no idea how to feel about.) They were killed in an accident in 2014, maybe two years after Elektra left Columbia, and again there’s a photograph of the funeral, Elektra all in black with a veil like an Asian Audrey Hepburn. And after that, nothing. Nothing in the society pages, nothing in any registry that Darcy can access online, no records anywhere that Elektra Natchios still exists. Except, you know, for the fact that she dropped in at midnight. Also that she knows who Lilith and Daredevil are. And what Matt can do.

_Shit._

_He’d been in love with her,_ she tells herself, firmly, and closes out of the Google search. _That’s not weird, to tell someone what you can do if you feel that strongly._ For God’s sake, he’d told Claire about it. She’s known that for months, and it had never stung. This—for some godforsaken, irrational reason, this  _stings._ Because there it is, bubbling back up, _if what he said is true, if he’s been in love with me since he was eighteen, then—Jesus._ It’s not as though she hasn’t met people who are polyromantic, or—no, that’s not right. She can’t know what’s going on until she asks him, but Jesus Christ, does she want to? Right now? When everything is so shaky, when it’s barely been a day, when she can’t even begin to say how much it hurts that he hadn’t trusted her and that he’d broken a promise to her—Jesus, can she handle asking him that? _Hey, so, like—are you polyromantic? And along that line, when you were dating Elektra, whatever happened, whatever it was, were you in love with her and with me all at once? Because if you were that’s okay, I just—I don’t know how to handle that information right now and it kind of stings even though I know it shouldn’t because people_ can _do that, I know they can do that, I just wish you’d told me that that was the case and I wish that you’d told me that she knows about your senses, because damn it, because I know how hurt you were but that seems like something you would tell someone you’ve been dating for nearly a year—_

She heaves a breath. _Focus, Darcy, come on._ She’s not going to do this to herself. She _can’t_ do this to herself, not right now. Elektra is an ex—the ex, but also an ex—and there’s—there’s kind of a much bigger problem than everything to do with squishy feelsy bullsiht. _Like how she can blow us wide open and we wouldn’t be able to do a damn thing to stop her._

Jesus Christ, she needs to think. Why would Elektra let her know that she knows? _To freak me out. To get me scared._ Which means fuck getting nervous and fuck getting scared. She takes a deep breath, holds it, and lets it out again. If Matt’s right about her and all she likes doing is messing with people’s heads, then she won’t give Elektra the satisfaction. If Matt is wrong (and she’s not entirely sure that he is, at this point, but she needs to weigh the possibility that he is; she doesn’t want to compare Elektra and Grotto, but they’ve already been stabbed in the back once this week, and she doesn’t want it happening again) then Elektra was legitimately asking for help. She was asking for help, and in doing it she’s nosing after Daredevil and Lilith, and that in and of itself has its own host of issues.

 _Everyone wants to meet up with Lilith these days._ First Marisol, now Elektra, and before that there was Frank, though he didn’t particularly care who she was behind the mask, and then Brett, who wants to help but thankfully wants nothing to do with any of them in person, and seriously, can the world stop pulling all this bullshit for maybe thirty seconds so she can sleep—

_It seems a rather large hole in the patchwork, as it were._

Fuck. Fucking hell. Her eyes burn. Darcy wipes the tears off her face with the back of her hand. She’s _not going to let this get to her._ She will _not_ , because if Elektra’s playing a game that’s just what she wants. ( _And if she isn’t, then…what, Darcy?_ ) Her throat hurts. _Come on, think._

 _I trust you more than I’ve ever trusted anyone,_ Matt had said, and that—that she believes. And if he trusts her, more than anyone, enough to trust her with his own—how can she even put this. He trusts her with his own perception of himself. With—with his own truths and his own lies. He’s trusted her with everything in his head, things he can’t believe about himself, and she _can’t_ discount that. She absolutely will not discount that, because Matt doesn’t say things like that, not without meaning them. She’s known him for eight years. She _knows_ Matt, and yeah, Elektra knows this, somehow, and maybe Matt told her and maybe she figured it out, but—but it’s different. And it’s so petty to think this way, makes her feel small, filthy and crusty and vile, like something growing in the back of a fridge, but it’s _true._ She just—

_Stop and think before you jump to conclusions, Darcy._

Something cold touches her leg, and she flinches. It’s Rey. She doesn’t shake, this time, when Darcy puts a hand down to pet her head. She doesn’t shake, even when Darcy scuffs her fingers over the protruding bones of her spine, and she’s so damn small that when she heaves herself up onto Darcy’s lap and curls into a ball like a cat would she’s…well, she’s still bony and unwieldy and smells like dog and blood but, you know, it’s not as hard as it could be. Darcy still kind of sits there and looks at her for a minute or two, though, because _Christ._ Abused animal and trust from an abused animal and Rey heaving a sigh like she’s let go of something heavy and she can’t, with this. She doesn’t even like dogs. Why is she crying.

Karen stands at the door, fingers curled into the frame. “Darcy?”

“I’m fine,” Darcy says thickly, and touches both hands to Rey’s back. She shivers a little, but it stops almost immediately. “Hey, baby dog. How was Chat?”

Rey’s tail flickers a little, and she rests her chin on Darcy’s forearm, crushing it against the arm of her rolling chair.

“Chat talked to Darla,” says Karen. “Which, may I say, it was the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen in my life to have Darla actually like someone. And it won’t be a problem, Rey and Darla and Jen.”

“Jen?”

“Jen was there, she fawned.”

Which may explain why Rey’s stomach is bulging, now. “Jen was home in the middle of the work day?”

Karen shrugs. “I didn’t ask.”

 _You should have,_ Darcy thinks. Jen’s never home in the middle of the work day. If Jen’s home in the middle of the work day, then something’s wrong, and Jen’s not going to tell anyone that anything’s wrong unless they ask her straight out. She looks at the screen of her phone for a long time. _Will she even respond, if I text her?_ They haven’t talked since the argument in front of the courthouse, and she knows—well. Jen would respond, she’s sure. But she might not actually say anything. Darcy taps at the screen, and then swypes, _you feeling okay?_ “Huh.”

“In other news, Chat gave me the name of a vet who won’t charge too much to take care of the dog, so that at least I can deal with.”

That’s good, at least. Possibly the only good thing to happen this week. “Nothing else? Foggy said you went to talk with Ben, what’d he have to say?”

“A lot.” Karen clears her throat. “That mole, in the DA’s office, the one who told us what was going to happen with Grotto, they contacted him again this morning.”

Darcy lifts her head, still scratching very carefully under Rey’s collar, trying not to cut with her stubby nails. _Yes, please, give me something to focus on other than this, please please please give me something to do other than stew in my own ridiculousness—_ “What’d they have to say? Something about Castle?”

“About Reyes,” she says, and frowns. “Well, about Castle, too, and all the shit the DA’s office has managed to get up to in the past ten years, but mostly about Reyes.”

“That sounds ominous.” Darcy touches her fingers to Rey’s back. “Is it her college sex tape?”

“No,” Karen says, and circles around to stand next to Darcy, placing three pieces of printing paper on her desk, over her files and over her keyboard. They’re mostly blocks of text, and not just text but redacted text, huge pieces of the summaries and the analysis wiped clean with ink. They’ve been restricted, she thinks, or blacked out for the protection of investigators or CIs, witness protection or Reyes covering her ass, there’s no way to know. “Not—not exactly, no. Whoever warned Ben about the sting with Grote, they contacted him again. They sent him these.”

Darcy fingers one of the pages. “These aren’t from the Castle file.”

“No, they’re from an investigation into drug trafficking in the city last April. Which didn’t make any sense to either of us, because this doesn’t have anything to do with Castle, not really. He was in Iraq until the beginning of April, he wouldn’t have anything to do with the drug busts that the DA’s office had been trying to pull off.”

She remembers that, sort of. There have been a lot of ups and downs in the drug dealing part of the underworld since then. “Kitchen Irish were trying to make a comeback, I think? A lot of them were still hiding after what happened to Fisk, we kept smacking them down, but I remember there was one family working with a supplier in Chinatown to try and get a better grade of heroin on the streets.”

“Reyes was targeting these three groups, though,” Karen says. “The Dogs of War, they funneled stuff in on their bikes, high grade drugs, things they wouldn’t have had access to without backing. And then Los Milagros, they were bringing in a whole variety of shit from across the border, heroin and guns. They dabbled in human trafficking too, but that wasn’t what this task force was focused in.” She taps the third page. “And here we have the Brannigans and the O’Shaughnessys. Playing nice, for once.”

“So a task force that focused on the same three gangs Castle was focused on.”

“Yeah.”

 _Meat,_ Darcy thinks. _Meat where her face was supposed to be. Fucking bastard._ “Christ, you think—”

“It would match up.” Karen drops the paper back to the desktop again. “It’s what Ben thinks, he went to the _Bulletin_ to check everything in their old archives, he organized it, he knows where things are, but Darcy—his family’s dead, his house is basically untouched, he was shot in the head and kept in the hospital on a Do Not Resuscitate for months, woke up and left the hospital in July, and as soon as he was out these three groups started getting slaughtered. I don’t really see any other way for these pieces to fit together.”

“And the DA had a task force looking into these bastards back in April.” Had there been some kind of mix-up? _Christ, Brannigan’s still out there somewhere._ “And this was all the mole could send you?”

“They said they weren’t going to contact him again, but they did, and this is all they could forward.” Karen folds her arms across her stomach, starts to pace. “Darcy, the house, it was—it was creepy, there were dishes in the rack and on the table and toys all over the floor and mail just…piled up behind the front door, nobody’s been there in months, but security still came running. I really don’t like this.”

Back in April—the investigation into all the shit that Fisk managed to pull with the bureaucratic network of the New York City justice system is still ongoing, but so far as she recalls the first in-depth investigation into the DA’s office had been mostly completed by then. “You think the DA pushed too hard and the Castles were caught in the crossfire somehow.”

“I can’t prove it, not with this.” The papers are more redaction than words. When Karen waves a hand at them, one flutters back at them in a little _fuck you._ “There’s not enough evidence. Whoever’s funneling this to us is right; Reyes is wiping the map clean. Whatever happened, she doesn’t want it to interfere with her little scheme for the mayor’s office. She’s put everything into her _Castle is a psychopath_ basket and she’s taking it to the bank and if we don’t stop her, then—”

“Melisandre as the Mayor of New York,” says Darcy, and Karen snorts in spite of herself. “It isn’t particularly appetizing as an image, no.”

“All beware the Red Priestess,” Foggy says from the doorway. “What’s with the council of war? Also, whoa, dog in lap, Darce, I thought you hated dogs.”

“I don’t hate them, they just generally do not appeal.” Still, she doesn’t stop petting at Rey’s head. “Ben has news.”

“Is it more news about how we need to take the calm, chill cases from now on so we don’t get shot at? Again? All of us? Possibly all of us at once? Because that hasn’t happened yet and I’m walking around waiting for that little _Indiana Jones_ boulder to come up and squash me like a pancake.”

“You have the greatest ideas, Foggy,” Darcy says, and Foggy flips her off. “Karen, you wanna—”

They’ve already started arguing over her head. Darcy curls around the dog and breathes, for a while, lets the noise wash around her and into her head and fade everything else out. It’s easier to listen than to think. She has far too much to think and worry about.

She sits, and she listens, and she watches her phone. There’s no answer from Matt or Jen.

_._

_._

_._

She’s been home for half an hour by the time the keys finally turn in the lock. Darcy jabs at the space bar a few times, trying to scroll back through the many pages of bullshit about Cheyenne reservations that she’s found haunting the internet. (She’d been reading old articles about dead people that Willie Lincoln was linked to, both primarily and tertiarily, but she’d been distracted by the discovery that some people in the Maggia a decade ago had called Willie Lincoln things like “Willie Crazy Horse,” and she’d wanted to know if that was actually a legit naming scheme or if someone had decided to watch a bunch of racist John Wayne movies, and that had derailed into research about the Northern Cheyenne Reservation versus the Southern, and the differences between the two, and crime rates, and the history of the tribes, and she’d…possibly been distracting herself a little, she’ll admit it now. And hours later, she’s still not entirely sure anything she’s found online is accurate, because there had been way too many websites with flashing WordArt applications, which by their nature are untrustworthy things.) By the time she’s closed back out, Matt’s through the door and shut it behind him, leaving his keys in the bowl. “Hey.”

“Hey.” She sets her computer aside. “How did it go?”

“Roxxon?” Matt takes off his glasses, rubs at his eyes. “I mean, something’s going on. There was a little computer chip or something inside a pen and people were panicking and there was a lot of Japanese, I couldn’t make out most of it. And a British accountant, for some reason. I don’t know if it’ll turn out to actually be anything, it was mostly just…business issues, I think. Hard to tell.”

Kate would have been good, then, if there had been a lot of Japanese getting thrown around. _Damn_. “Um, I called, I don’t know if you heard.”

“I had my phone off.” He leaves his watch in the bowl, too. “I went walking and did research for the Jacinto thing at the courthouse, Angie says hi—what’s wrong?”

That explains some things, at least. “Um.” She folds her hands around the hem of the Topeka shirt. “Do you want the bad news, the uncomfortable but more positive news, or the slightly less uncomfortable but also more unsettling news first?”

Matt’s eyebrows snap together. He undoes the buttons on his shirt cuffs. “There aren’t better options?”

God, she wishes. “Not really.”

“Uncomfortable but positive.”

“Ah.” She’d been hoping for unsettling. “Ben’s contact in the DA’s office sent him more information and it sounds like he and Karen are on to something with the Castle thing. It’s not a lot, but they’re looking into it. Kate’s helping, or she was.”

“Did she come back this afternoon?”

“No, she had class and landlady stuff to do, but I’ve been texting her.”

And out comes the tie. Matt drapes it over the back of one of the dining table chairs, and rubs at his eyes again. Christ, neither of them have slept enough. “That’s positive?”

“I’m taking it over any of them going it alone and nearly getting themselves killed. That’s happened enough in the past week.” She presses a pillow hard into her stomach, and curls around it, resting her chin on her knees to watch him putter around. “You look like you went one-on-one with Hulk Hogan.”

“So I look fine, then,” he says, his mouth curling. Darcy snorts.

“Don’t be cocky.”

“What’s the unsettling news?”

“Marisol Guerra wants to meet Lilith and Daredevil.”

He fumbles an apple out of the bowl, and nearly drops it. “Seriously?”

“Mm.”

“And she’s asking us because—”

“Fisk,” says Darcy, and Matt says, “Ah.” She’s pretty sure it’s just because of the Fisk thing, anyway. It’s possible that Marisol had been lying—again, lying _again_ —but she’s not certain. It’s not like she can hear someone’s heartbeat. “I’m looking into it. As me, not as Lilith. I don’t think it’ll pan out to anything, really, but I can at least look.”

“What’s she asking for?”

She goes over it as quick as she can. The Brett thing makes his mouth twist, but he doesn’t argue with it, at least. It’s not like she could have said no without making Brett even more suspicious, anyway. “It probably won’t wind up anywhere, but I’m looking into it anyway. And if Marisol keeps nagging me about the Lilith thing, I don’t know. I don’t want to like…fire her as a client or whatever, there are more cases coming in against the Manhattan School of Music because of her, but I don’t want to get harassed about Lilith every time I meet up with her to let her know how things are going. Worst comes to worst I could always visit her as Lilith and tell her to back off, but that’ll just confirm the link to the firm, which I don’t really want to do. So yeah, unsettling.”

He hums. She’s pretty sure the whole of the Marisol and Willie Lincoln talk just went in one ear and out the other, but she doesn’t exactly care at the moment. “You’re doing that thing.”

“That thing?”

“You babble when you don’t want to say something.”

 _This isn’t something you’re going to like hearing._ “Yeah, um, the bad news. The thing is, I had a call—I mean, it was kind of random, I don’t know—”

“Darcy.”

“And I already talked to Karen and she says it was a mistake, that she said that she was a client and dropped enough details that she thought it would be kosher—”

“ _Darcy_ —”

“The point to all that is like—don’t get grumpy with Karen because she’s already kicking herself enough and don’t get huffy because I can take care of myself, I really can—”

“Will you just—”

“Elektra called me,” she says.

He goes very still, wavering, a reflection in warped glass.  “When?”

“Today. This afternoon. To ask about the case, and, um. Other stuff. But yeah, she, um. She called.”

Matt presses his lips thin. “I’ll deal with it.”

“Matt—”

“I told her to leave you alone and she didn’t, and that’s not something I’m—” He fumbles the apple again, and it lands hard on the tabletop. Bruised to hell now, she thinks. “Damn it.”

She can’t tell if she’s pleased, or pissed. There’s a prickling under her skin like ants. “Wait, you told her to leave me alone?”

“I said that her problem’s with me and if she tried to pull you into this then she wouldn’t like the consequences, yeah.”

Oh. “When you were talking about the case?”

“She’s here to tug at all our strings.” He snags his jacket again. “The case is only the excuse.”

Darcy unfolds from the couch. “I don’t care about the case, that’s not the problem—”

“Whatever game she’s playing—”

“Matt, she knows who we are.”

Matt stops, halfway down the hall. She’s not sure if it’s because of the shock, or because of how she sounds, or because of the way her heart’s beating or because of some other, completely inscrutable reason, and she just—she can’t, anymore. She doesn’t know how to feel anything anymore. Darcy twists the hem of her shirt tight between her fingers, crumpling it up.

“How?” he says.

“She said, um. She saw you listening in to the Roxxon thing. And she said something like, _look at it the right way and it’s obvious._ So she knows that you’re—you. And that I’m me.” Her voice breaks. “And—and what you can do, apparently, which—kind of took me by surprise, because I like to think you would have told me that if she hadn’t—I mean.”

“I forgot,” he says. “I—I didn’t—I forgot.”

“Kind of a big thing to forget.”

“In comparison to—” He stops. “It slipped my mind.”

And it’s been a long week, so she can’t begrudge him that, but still. “I think I played it off okay, I dunno. It’s hard to tell over the phone, and I never knew her all that well anyway, so.”

Matt’s hand curls against his side. He turns. “Darcy.”

“It’s okay,” Darcy says. _Christ, please don’t let sound like a lie._ “I mean, I didn’t—it’s kind of not really great, that she can—well, that she can report us to the police and get us arrested and disbarred and, you know, imprisoned, probably in gen pop with people we’ve beaten up over the past year, but I’m just really hoping it won’t come to that, though I don’t know how exactly we can stop her from saying things to people—”

“That’s not—”

“And I mean, the rest of it took me by surprise, but you guys were, you know, what you were, and I just—I don’t know, it’s not something that I have the right to—” God, why can’t she speak? Why can she never _talk_ when it really matters? Why the hell is her throat squeezing the words away? “I just, um, didn’t expect it, that’s all, and it was—”

“Darcy—”

“You were in love with her, I get it—”

“You don’t.” He shakes his head. “Darcy—”

“You don’t have to explain any of it, Matt, just—” Her voice cracks, and _fuck her life._ “It’s—I don’t need to know—”

She doesn’t realize he’s crossed the room until he’s caught her by the wrist. Darcy yips, strangled all of a sudden, and fists her hands up against his chest, trying to push back, because she can’t be held right now, she really can’t, she’s going to either scream or burst into tears. Not after last night, not after this afternoon, not after Frank. _Seriously, any other week._ “Darcy, look—look at me, please—”

“Matt, seriously—”

“Darcy,” he says again, and his voice is shaking, he’s touching her, drawing his fingers down her cheeks, her throat, over her shoulders, his lips are parted and his eyes have flared wide open behind his glasses and she can’t _do this_ right now, she can’t, she really can’t— “Darcy, just—listen to me for a second—”

“You don’t have to explain anything, Matt, I don’t—I don’t really want to hear it, to be honest, just—”

“ _Look at me_ ,” Matt says, and she looks at him because she can’t help it. Her skin hurts. He brushes his thumb across her cheek, and she only realizes she’s crying when it smears. He waits, and it’s only once she’s swallowed, once and again, that he says, “I didn’t tell her.”

She stops. All at once, she stops, and stares at him, trying to pick everything out of his face. Fear, she thinks, and sadness, and frustration, and something else, something edging around softness, something tender in the set of his mouth that makes her whole body ache. “You didn’t—”

“I didn’t tell her.”

God. She shouldn’t be relieved, but she is. “But if—”

“Listen.” He presses his other hand to her cheek, careful of the cut, and just stands there, breathing, his glasses reflecting red across the bones in his face. Watching him is like staring into the sun. She shuts her eyes. “I didn’t tell her, the—you’re the only—will you just look at me for a second, please—”

Darcy shakes her head. “Elektra—”

“—guessed.” He’s so close that she can’t see much else, even through the blur that her vision’s become, even through the tears. “Elektra guessed.”

“How?”

He shrugs. “She watches people.”

 _Pick them apart,_ _figure out their quirks,_ and she _does not_ want to compare herself and Elektra Natchios anymore. Not in her head, not anywhere.

“She guessed,” he says again. “And—and with everyone else, everyone else who knows, I had to tell them. Claire knew I was blind as soon as she pulled me out of the dumpster, Foggy—Foggy was an accident, and you know what happened with Karen. But I told you.”

She sniffs, and chokes a little. She thinks it might be some kind of bastardized laugh. “Yeah, because I’d figured you out, too.”

“No, I—Darcy, when I went to see you, I’d already decided I was going to tell you. All of it, everything. After I found those two bastards working with Goodman, Lynch and Jenson, remember? I’d—I’d decided to tell you. I told you what I could do because I wanted to, not because I had to. You’re the only one I’ve ever told because I wanted to, Darcy. I—it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, but I wanted to do it. Because it was you.”

She hiccups. She can’t help it. This is so stupid, to be so fixed on this, petty and childish and ridiculous, but she hiccups and turns her face into his palm to hide it, and Matt pulls her into him. The edginess, the shakiness, that matters less right now than listening to his heart, the steadiness of it, no matter how fast it’s beating. When he sets his lips to her forehead, it stings. “I told you because it was you,” he says, and she wraps her arms around him and hides her face. “I told you because it was _you_ , Darcy. You—you’re not second. You never have been.”

Darcy makes a sound like shearing metal. His heart’s racing under his ribs, and he’s bent, there’s only half a foot between them but sometimes he feels so much larger than she is, especially when he does this, when he wraps around her and holds on with all the force he keeps trapped inside, mixing them up until there’s no space left between the pair of them, until sometimes it feels like she’s going to weave into his bones and create some freakish, Platonistic creature with two heads and four arms and four legs, a dual being, two hearts at once. He pets at her hair and at her spine, rests his mouth to her scalp and breathes, saying it, over and over, “You’re not second, you’ve never been second, please don’t cry,” and every time she chokes and nearly bursts with it, all the feelings building up in her throat. She chokes and presses closer until she has to be breaking his ribs, but he doesn’t let go. If anything, he holds on tighter.

“I’m not crying,” she says, but she’s twisted and awful-sounding, and her cheeks are wet, which, fuck her life. “It’s a stupid thing to cry about, it’s—”

“It’s not.” He puts his mouth to her hair. “It’s not stupid.”

She hiccups again, and tries to breathe through her nose. It doesn’t work out very well. It’s been such a long week, and she’s had too many people in her head lately, first Frank and now Elektra, and things shouldn’t be this _hard_ , not all at once. She wants whoever or whatever decided that all of this needed to happen at the same time to go and sit on a poker. Preferably flaming and rusty, but she’s not picky. Matt’s making soft sounds into her hair, the way you do when you’re trying to stop someone from crying, or soothe them through it, and it breaks the dam. Darcy digs her nails into him, and suddenly she can’t really breathe, she’s crying, awful rasping sobs that barely break out of her before they shatter into pieces, cutting them both to bits. She can’t stop, even when Matt scoops her up off the floor and backs up onto the couch, settling her sideways across his lap. Darcy presses her face into his neck and cries, and Matt holds on, whispering so low that she can’t actually make out any of it, lips moving against her hair. She cries because of everything that happened with Frank, and Frank’s family, and the photograph; she cries because of the fights, because of everything she’d thought she nearly lost, because she’s never going to get it out of her head, watching Matt fall; she cries because of all the stupidity and all the frustration and all the helpless hours spent in the hospital, fear of being exposed and hurt from the words corkscrewing under her skin and for all the hate inside her that she can’t get rid of, for everything she hasn’t cried about since Fisk, and Matt presses his mouth to her hairline, murmuring against her skin. She’s not sure how long it lasts, only that when she finally can’t catch her breath, when things start dying down, she’s left an awful smear against his shirt, and she feels—not empty, exactly. Wrung out like a towel. Pinned to a clothesline like a dishrag. Twisted and twisted until all the tears have been pressed out.

“I feel idiotic,” she says, scraping. Matt shakes his head.

“You don’t have to.”

“I shouldn’t have let it get to me, it was—”

“I told you she plays games.” Matt knocks his chin to her temple, so careful that she barely feels it until he speaks. “This is what she does, she—she likes seeing what she can do with people. And—and to people. She’s good at it. I should have—I don’t know. I should told you.”

“You did.”

“Not well enough.”

Darcy squeezes her arms around his ribs. _I nearly lost you,_ she thinks, half a dozen times in the past few days alone, and they’re shaky but they’re holding, and she’s not about to let go.

“She knows who we are,” she says.

“Elektra won’t tell.”

“You can’t know that for sure.”

“That’s not her game.” His lips twist. “Besides, she knows I can bury her if I want to.”

Like that’s not ominous. “It’s not a big deal.” Darcy curls her fingers into the collar of his shirt, scraping her nails over his clavicle. “It just—I’m tired. Everything with Frank, just—none of it would have bothered me so much if I weren’t so tired.”

“Her problem’s with me,” Matt says. He puts his mouth back to her hairline. “Her problem’s with me, not with you. Whatever she’s here for, she’s—I don’t know. She wants to get me to do something, or acknowledge something, or _something,_ and I thought she would leave you out of it, but she lashed out anyway and that’s—” There’s a cast to his voice like nighttime, like the Devil, and she clenches her fingers into the fabric of his shirt and presses closer. “She won’t do it again.”

“You can’t control her, Matt, that’s not how people work.”

“She’ll back off if I tell her to.”

“I’m a grown-up, if anyone needs to tell her off—”

“She said what she did because she knew it would piss me off,” Matt says. “Even if you go after her, it won’t make her stop. She’ll only stop if I talk to her.”

Darcy leans back, and searches his face. He’s already decided, she can tell—he has the set-jaw, clenched-eyebrows thing going—but she still tips, and rests her head to his shoulder. “You don’t have to do this because of me, Matt.”

“It’s not just because of you.”

Darcy curls into him again. She hides in his throat, in the soft places, and Matt hooks his arms around her and winds close, the way that they haven’t in days. Eggshells and thorns, warmth and sharpness and Matt, and this is something she can’t lose, not really. She doesn’t want to lose this. The longer she sits, the looser she feels, until she’s floating inside her skin, relaxed and relieved and _God, I missed you_.

“What happened?” she says. “With you and Elektra.”

His throat works. His lungs stop. She thinks his heart might have, too, until she rests her palm to his chest and feels it beating, far, far too fast. He shudders a little, static and icicles down his spine. When he clears his throat, it snaps in his chest.

“Sorry.” Darcy shuts her eyes. “I told you I wouldn’t ask, or, you know, I implied it, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want—”

“She—um.” He swallows again. “I’m not—let me talk to her. Today. And then—I’ll tell you after I get back, tonight.”

“Seriously, Matt, you don’t have to—”

“After this week,” he says, “yes, I do.”

And that could mean any number of things, including but not limited to _after both of us nearly died_ and _after both of us nearly killed someone_ and _after Frank_ and _after all of it_ , and it’s making something inside her itch, scabs cracking and pulling at her skin. “You don’t have to tell me if you’re doing it to prove something. It was—clearly whatever it was hurt both of you, a lot, and I don’t—”

“I need to.” He traces circles at the soft spot behind her ear, tickling with his thumb. “Just—let me talk to her, first. I need to make sure that she knows she needs to leave, and not come back.”

And that, she thinks, is that. “You’re such a stubborn bastard,” she says into his neck, and Matt scoffs. “Why did I have to pick such a stubborn Irish bastard?”

“What does me being Irish have to do anything?”

“You’re stubborn.” He scoffs again, but she can feel him relaxing, just a little. “You’re stubborn and you have a shit temper and I feel like both of those things are stereotypically Irish.”

“What does that say about you?”

“Haven’t you ever heard of the fiery Latina? As gross and harmful as that stereotype is. Also, you know, half-Russian, born Southern, it’s like the worst combo for _take no shit and do all harm._ ”

Matt hums, and nudges her temple with his nose. “It’s been a shit week.”

“God, don’t talk to me about this week. This week was actually awful and needs to be taken out back and shot with extreme prejudice.”

“Thank you,” Matt says, and when she leans back to look at him, he scuffs his knuckles down her cheek. “Just—thank you.”

“What for?”

“All of it.” He touches his thumb to her nose. “For being you.”

Oh. “That wasn’t really all that hard. One thing I actually _am_ good at is being me.”

“Still.” Matt draws his forefinger over the line of her clavicle, along the dip and up to her pulse in a warped circle. It’s thoughtless, she thinks. He’d hesitate, if it weren’t. “Thank you. For being here, and being the way you are, and—I don’t know. Thank you.”

Darcy covers his hand with hers, pressing it close to her cheek, and looks at him. “I’m here because I want to be, and because you’re my best friend, and because I love you, even though you’re a stubborn Irish bastard who needs to get whacked with a baseball bat. And I don’t say it enough, but it’s true. And we’ll get through this, Matt.”

Matt’s smile is shaky, and tiny, half a ghost, but he leaves his thumb on her cheek and puts his mouth to her forehead, quiet and careful and steady. He has to go and talk to Elektra, she thinks. Or fight with her. Either way, she can hold on for just a little while longer.

_We have to get through this. Please, please let us get through this._

.

.

.

It’s a while, before he leaves. She’s not too fussed about it. She sits and she breathes him, and it’s easier, that way. She’s so used to touching him at this point that not doing it, holding herself back, scrapes away at her insides the way someone guts a pumpkin. So it’s only after that the sun’s set and she’s dozed and woken up and dozed again (she thinks he might have, too, because she catches him half-sighing the way he does when he’s only barely conscious) that she finally mutters something about showering, and working for a while. They’re all on the same page now, the entire group—even Foggy, who hadn’t seemed particularly happy about any of the directions their lives are spiraling at the moment, and _especially_ not about the Brett thing—and now that there’s half a plan for Elektra and that whole situation she can start actually actively researching and investigating without getting distracted. …she’s still showering first, because she feels disgusting, but yeah, that’s the plan for the evening.

Her plans always get scuppered, though. Darcy’s halfway in the shower when her phone rings. “ _Bitch, this is Kate, don’t ignore me again._ ” (Yes, okay, she really enjoys handing people her phone and having them record personal messages as their ringtone, but at the same time, Kate, seriously, _not_ the best choice for someone who works in the legal system.) She’s tempted to ignore it anyway, because she feels like a panda and she really, really wants to stand under hot water right now, even with the weather being shit as it is, but when the tone goes off again, she whacks the speakerphone button. “What.”

“Touchy.”

“I’m literally naked in the bathroom right now, Katie, what is it?”

She snorts. “And you tell _me_ TMI. I’m calling because I have a request for your magnificent presence, Lewis. Or less a request than an order, because I don’t argue with Elena Cardenas anymore. She wants all of you guys over for dinner if you can manage it, because, and I quote, _I say so._ ”

Ah, shit. “Katie, I can’t, I look like shit and I’ve had a horrible day—”

“You haven’t shown up in three months and she’s starting to take it personally. If I were you, Lewis, I’d get your ass down here. And I’d do it even if I _weren’t_ you, because she’s been making food all afternoon and it actually smells amazing.”

Well, that answers the question of where Kate’s been since this morning. “How’s life as a landlord?”

“I still maintain that Clint and I came up with the idea completely independently.” Kate makes a motorboat noise. “There’s been some complaints about noise from new tenants, and I’ve been here all afternoon trying to sort things out, they don’t speak a lot of English and my Japanese isn’t good enough to like...really communicate the problem. I should probably get Yoko down here, honestly, but she’s in Osaka for another two weeks with my other aunt and my cousins, so that’s out. But Elena’s been really good. Like eight more families actually managed to get their rent in on time last month because of her. Even if she keeps trying to set me up with the guy on the fourth floor.”

This is a very normal conversation. She could have sworn that she wasn’t allowed to have those anymore. “What guy? I didn’t know there was a guy.”

“He’s like nineteen, Darcy.”

“So are you.”

“I’m twenty.”

“Yeah, yeah, kid. I’m only asking because you brought him up, and I feel like I should be warned if Elena’s on the warpath. Also, if I’m coming over there, I should at least know his name.”

“Miles,” says Kate, sourly. “His name is Miles, he’s going to university somewhere in the city, he works at a convenience store, he’s a Taurus according to Elena, and he’s here right now talking to her about something or other to do with the food, which is why I’m hiding in the bathroom and pulling spy shit with you instead of gorging myself on tortillas.”

“Aww, poor Katie.” She sits down on her towel. “She’s really pulling the whole matchmaking arsenal out, isn’t she?”

“She’s bored because Raoul left and because none of you guys show up anymore and even though she has a whole life as the building super and basically runs this place like a freaking Navy vessel, she still carves time out of her day to try and pair me off with the only semi-eligible guy in the building.”

“Semi-eligible?”

“I’m like fifty percent certain he’s gay.” The whole bathroom has reached the level of steam that should only be found in tropical jungles. Darcy traces out a dead smiley face against the glass of the shower door, listening. “He and Elena get on really well, she’s like…adopted him Claire-style. Which is partially why I’m calling to beg you to come, because _please_ save me. I’m worried she’s going to pull a Nelson and Page maneuver and like…leave the room without warning and make me eat dinner alone with the guy. Not that he’s bad-looking or awful or whatever, I just don’t want the awkwardness of like…I don’t know, being that person.”

“That person?”

“That person. The one that stares awkwardly out the window instead of saying anything and makes small talk about the weather because there’s literally nothing else to say. Who may possibly break someone’s wrist if they try to touch them, because like…please do not.”

She says it jokingly, but there’s a little thread underneath the words that’s worrying. Darcy looks at the shower head, at the water and the steam on the mirror, and then rubs at her eyes. “Give me like forty minutes, I really do need to shower.”

“Cool. Elena will add more serrano and it’ll be great, she never does it when it’s me. I think she thinks my poor ass can’t handle her spiciest foods, which is a blatant lie, but she always adds more when she knows you’re coming over. I think she’s trying to, like, inspire your Guatemalan roots or something.”

“Glad to know I’ve managed to do one thing right today,” Darcy says. “I’m hanging up now, Kate.”

“Sure you don’t want to leave me on speaker and talk to me while you’re shampooing?”

She hangs up rather than respond to that, because really, Kate can handle awkward social situations on her own for forty minutes. She swans into multi-million dollar fundraisers and manages an Avenger in her spare time, this is right up her alley.

Or not, apparently, because by the time Darcy finally shows up (with the last of the tequila that Claire had dropped on her head for her birthday in March) Kate has an expression on her face like she’s being set up against the wall for a mugshot, and the kid, Miles, looks like he wants to curl into a ball and have someone step on him. He’s tall and gangly and indeterminate, race-wise, though the _Morales_ part of his name says he’s at least a little Spanish or some variation on Latin American. Or South American. Possibly even Indonesian, now that she thinks about it. She doesn’t ask. “Darcy,” she says, shaking his hand. “Where’s Elena?”

“Kitchen,” Miles says, clinging to her fingers with the kind of relief she usually only gets from McDonald’s workers in dark parking lots after she’s knocked some mugger out with her taser. “You’re the lawyer?”

“One of them.” The bag with the tequila in it is kind of cutting into her arm, ow. She can’t really blame him for looking a little disbelieving; she’s not dressed much like a lawyer right now. She found her knee-high boots in the back of the closet a few weeks ago, and she’s been wearing them every chance she gets, lately, but there are only so many things that go with stabby sex boots. Basically, she looks like either an assassin or a femme fatale right now, and it’s kind of great. Even if it’s still a bit too warm for a turtleneck. (Fucking bruises.) “You’re new.”

“I live upstairs, I moved in last month.” He scuffs a hand over the back of his head, and stops suddenly, like the buzz cut is a surprise. “This building is a lot more, um. Hands’ on than the last one I lived in.”

“Nosy,” Darcy says. “You mean everyone who lives in this building is a lot nosier. It’s okay, you can say it. I don’t live here for a reason.”

“You don’t live here because if you did you’d have to deal with me bossing you around and you’d hate that.” Kate doesn’t look up from her phone. “Also because you live with your boyfriend or whatever, but that’s the main reason and we both know it.”

Darcy makes a face at her, and says to Miles, “Kate is the most mature landlady I know.”

“That’s what I’ve gathered,” Miles says, very mildly, and stares at his plate when Kate’s head snaps up. “Like I said, it’s very hands’ on.”

“Welcome to the crazy train.” There’s a clattering from the kitchen. Darcy dumps her coat on the back of the chair, and sets the bottle of tequila up on the table. “Don’t touch, minors.”

Kate glares. “Bitch, don’t even.”

“Ay, _mi hija,_ you _are_ here.” Elena throws her dish towel onto the dining table, and catches Darcy’s other hand, drawing her away from Miles and pulling her down to kiss her cheek. She smells like flour and dried roses, and her flyaway hair is rising in little clouds from her head, thanks to the humidity and the steam and the fact that the air conditioning is barely blowing in here, the hell. “ _Tres meses_ , _carajo, dondé diablos has estado_?”    

“ _Limpiando tras los chicos_ ,” Darcy says, and kisses Elena’s cheek. “ _Lo siento,_ Elena.”

“English.” Elena flaps her free hand in a distinctly Foggy-ish fashion. “I am practicing.”

Right. “Sorry, forgot. Why is your air conditioning off?”

“Because she’s crazy.” Kate drops down hard into one of the cushy chairs, sitting sideways and flinging her legs over the arm. “She says it isn’t hot.”

“Is no hot,” Elena says placidly, in her buttoned cardigan and her stockings.

“I’m dyin’, Lewis.” Kate shuts her eyes. “I’m a delicate fucking flower, I’m not built for this heat. Give me seventy degrees and ice cubes, not this bullshit.”

“Language,” says Elena. Miles coughs, and hides a smile behind his hand. “No Señor Murdock, tonight?”

“You can call him Matt, y’know. You call me Darcy. And you call Foggy, Foggy. I don’t think he’d mind.”

Elena shakes her head. “Señor Murdock, no. He shy,” she says, in an aside to Miles. “ _Fuera del tribunal._ Very shy, her Mr. Murdock.”

 _Shy_ , Kate mouths, and hides behind her phone to keep from giggling. And yeah, sure, shy is one way to put the whole _I hide all my feelings behind my glasses and don’t share things with people ever for fear of judgment_ thing that Matt has going on. It’s not exactly the word she would have chosen, but some parts of it kind of apply. Maybe. A little. Sort of. Darcy bites her tongue. “Yes,” she says, solemnly. “He’s very shy, my Mr. Murdock.”

There’s a noise coming from Kate’s corner that could be snickering, if not for the fact it sounds more like a mouse that’s trapped itself in an electrical outlet.

“He had something to take care of tonight, so it’s just me. And Señor Tequila. I feel like that’s an acceptable replacement for Matt. Is Foggy coming?”

“ _Sí._ ” Elena looks pleased. “With a friend, he say.”

“Marci.” Kate’s pink with muffled laughter. “He said he’s bringing Marci. Or he will be, eventually. When they show up.”

“It’s a party.”  

“I take this,” Elena says, and weasels the bag with the tequila out of Darcy’s grip. “You sit.”

“I can help with the food, Elena, honestly—”

“ _Sit_.”

You don’t disobey Elena Cardenas. Darcy sits down at the dining table, and crosses her ankles under her chair. Miles kind of hovers for a minute or two, and then settles next to her, his lips still twitching. _Shy._ Christ. She’s not telling Matt about that. Kate will, probably—Kate loves irritating Matt, it’s kind of great—but she’s not going to say a goddamn word. She will hold that memory like a precious jewel, and not let Matt getting huffy tarnish a single moment of it.

“You’re not what I expected when Elena said that she was inviting her lawyer.” Miles rubs a hand over the back of his head again. “I, um. Sorry, that didn’t come out the way I intended it to.”

“That is by far not the weirdest thing someone has said to me this week so far. You’re good.” She leans back in her chair. “I’m not in my robot suit, I don’t have to act like an attorney right now. Kate, feet on the floor, not on the wall.”

“Yes, mom,” says Kate, in a sing-song voice, but she puts her feet back on the floor again. Sometimes Darcy has to remind herself that she shouldn’t use the momfriend powers for evil, but she cannot deny, sometimes her people make it incredibly tempting. “You think Elena will let us touch the tequila before Foggy and Marci get here or should I sneak it out of the bottom cupboard where she hides things?”

“I hear that,” Elena says from the kitchen, and Miles coughs, covering his mouth with one hand. He plays it off by rubbing at his jaw, but it was _definitely_ a muffled snort, and yeah, Miles Morales is going on her good list, if he hadn’t been there already. He has this weird air about him that’s simultaneously nervous and incredibly soothing, like he’s super chill but he’s too anxious to remember it most of the time. Darcy catches Kate’s eye, and then folds her arms on the tabletop.

“So what’s your story, morning glory?” She cocks her head at Miles. “If Elena’s adopted you, you have one. She likes taking care of people that she thinks need supervising.”

Miles coughs. “I’m not anyone, really. I live upstairs. I helped her with her groceries one time and now she’s like…I’m thinking the term is honorary abuela? But she’s also the building super, so like. It’s weird.”

“Honorary abuela is a title she wears with great pride. Kind of what she did to me. And Katie,” she adds, and Kate flips her off without looking up from her phone, because that’s always what she does when Darcy calls her Katie in front of other people. “We’re her herd of awkward ducklings, of varying ages and nationalities. You from the city?”

“Yeah, uh. Washington Heights, before it wound up too expensive.”

“And stuffed to the gills with rich folks and hipsters?”

“Truth,” says Miles. Out of the corner of her eye, she can see Kate spying on the pair of them through her hair. “Hell’s Kitchen’s cheaper than anywhere else in the city right now. Reconstruction’s down the tube and the crime rate’s up after Fisk, even with all the vigilantes. Plus nobody wants to move to New York anymore just because of the alien thing. Means I only have to work two jobs to keep myself in school and a decently sized apartment instead of three for a closet.”

“Jobs?”

“Cashier at Walgreen’s.” He shrugs. “After-school tutor for high schoolers.”

“School?”

“NYU. Biochem.”

“Cool beans. Don’t mention that when Foggy and Marci get here.”

Miles blinks. “Why?”

“Marci wanted to go into animal rights, she gets twitchy when she hears about any kind of science that does animal testing. I’d fudge it and say like…architecture is safe.”

“I don’t know anything about architecture.”

“Make it up.” Kate rolls her eyes. “It’s what the rest of us do when confronted with Daenerys Targaryen.”

“I still kind of want to pay you to say that to her face,” Darcy says. “I really want to see if she gets mad or if she gets happy. Or both.”

“White savior ahoy, though,” Kate says. “For serious. If we’re talking _A Song of Ice and Fire,_ again, though, can we build off of Dorne’s rules and make the whole thing a matriarchy? Because the Sand Snakes can do absolutely whatever they want to me and I will probably just lie there bleeding and thank them for doing it.”

Miles blinks at them. A slow smile creeps over his lips. “You’ve read the books.”

“Have you _not_ read the books?” Kate makes a face. “Get out.”

“We have lists.” Darcy drums her nails on the table. “Mostly on the many, many ways that Petyr Baelish needs to die. Also, about how gay Margaery Tyrell is, because that needs to be a thing.”

“Oberyn Martell, though,” says Miles, and that right there is a conversation that lasts them all the way to Foggy and Marci swanning in like they own the place. Marci looks around with the air of someone who took a wrong turn on the way to Tiffany’s, but at least she manages to keep her tongue between her teeth, and really, that’s the best anyone can hope for when it comes to Marci, sometimes.

“Darcy.” Foggy beams at her. “I didn’t think you were coming.”

“Kate dragged me out.” And she’s exhausted, for sure, and should probably be curling up in bed with police files right now, but when Foggy scoots over and kisses the top of her head (which he’s been doing more, lately, but it still feels like having a gold nugget crop up in her Cheerios) she decides right then and there that it’s worth it, pretending to be normal for a night. “This is Miles. Elena’s adopted him. I have also adopted him, because he wants Sansa Stark as Queen of Westeros. We’re gonna make bumper stickers. _Ride or Die for Sansa Stark, Queen 2K5EVER._ ”

“Have you been drinking?”

“The tequila was confiscated until after the food, so no. Have _you_ been drinking? You smell like Josie’s.”

“Quit judging me,” says Foggy.

“I always judge you. Miles, this is my legal partner, Foggy Nelson. He’s also my platonic life-partner—”

Foggy shoves her.

“—and a Stannis-stan, which you can rant about later, because if you get him started he won’t stop. And this is Marci Stahl, Queen of Evil and Stiletto Heels.”

“That’s a much better title than I usually get.” Marci’s mouth quirks. “You look less shitty than usual.”

“HC and B must be treating you nicely if you’re being that complimentary, especially when I have a honking huge cut on my face,” says Darcy. “Has Jeri Hogarth hit on you yet?”

“No, and it’s incredibly tragic. Not that I would take her up on it, but it’s hard to realize that I’m apparently not universally appreciated.”

“Your worst nightmare,” Darcy says, and Marci actually winks at her.

“You guys talk like Toby Ziegler fast and my head hurts,” says Miles. In her corner, Kate makes the electrocuted mouse noise again, and hides her face behind her hair.

“Funny story, I used to tape _The West Wing_ and watch it in the middle of the night to piss my mom off. It’s why I have such an excellent fucking vocabulary. Also, why I started wanting to be a lawyer.” Foggy drops into the chair to Darcy’s right. “Where’s Matt?”

“Matt’s dealing with the Wicked Witch.”

“Ah,” says Foggy.

“There’s a Wicked Witch other than me?” Marci drapes herself into a chair, and then looks surprised at herself. Darcy’s pretty sure Marci hasn’t _draped_ anywhere since their 1L year and she’d still been a brunette. And actually remembered what sweatpants were. And how to leave the house without false eyelashes. “Does that make Murdock Dorothy?”

“I don’t think there’ll be squashing-via-house charges in his future, no.”

“Boo,” says Marci. “We could have represented him. Well, I wouldn’t have, because no offense to you, Lewis, but I don’t care what your boyfriend does—”

“He appreciates that.”

“—but one of the baby affiliates, maybe. The janitor might do well.”

“Somehow I don’t think HC and B would be the first firm Matt would go to for representation, if he were put up on murder charges.”

“Boo,” she says again.

“Ignore her,” says Foggy, and then winces. Darcy’s pretty sure Marci just kicked him under the table. “Or pay attention, you know, up to you guys.”

“So is this a thing that’s back on?” Darcy looks from one to the other. “The Foggy and Marci thing? Or do you tag along to anyone’s random dinner with an old client, Stahl?”

Marci scoffs. “He wishes.” Still, she looks pleased, and maybe a bit pink around the ears, and a hell of a lot more like law school!Marci than L&Z!Satan!Marci, which is good enough for Darcy. “He’d have to do some serious work to tempt me back into your little circle of insanity.”

Foggy clears his throat. “It’s up in the air.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“It isn’t?”

“Up in the air implies something’s been thrown up in the air. So far as I can see? The ball is still in your court, Foggy-bear.”

He blinks a few times. “Oh.”

“Yeah,” Marci says. “Oh.”

“Can we change the subject before I projectile vomit all over this nice rug?” Kate bounces up out of the chair. “Lewis, come help me with something.”

“You mean come and save you from something.”

“Six of one,” says Kate. “Come on, I wanna show you how the repairs have gone up, it looks pretty goddamn slick.”

The repairs, Darcy thinks, have been done for three months, and she saw them the last time she came out to Elena’s. Still, she gets to her feet (heels, blisters, ow, thank you, inventor of band-aids and gauze padding) and trails Kate out the door of Elena’s apartment, and into the new elevator. Darcy thinks, for a minute, that they’re going to go up to the roof—usually they go up to the roof, if Kate wants to talk about something and doesn’t want anyone else to hear—but instead Kate jabs the button for the basement, and slips her hands into the pockets of her skinny jeans.

“What’s up?” Darcy says, once the elevator doors close. The elevator’s new, installed maybe four months ago, and somehow nobody’s graffitied it yet. She’s pretty sure that everyone’s too scared of Kate and too fond of Elena to dare besmirch the thing, even with how new and shiny it is. “This isn’t the thing about Elena matchmaking again, is it?”

“No.” Kate cuts her a look. “She’s been muttering at me about you and Matt getting married, though, so she might bring that up, just as a warning.”

And there go her knees. She kind of wants to faint a little bit. “ _Christ_. Seriously?”

“The muttering gets noisier the later it gets, but yeah, seriously. She keeps asking me if you’re engaged yet, and she doesn’t like the excuses I keep coming up with.”

“They’re not excuses!”

“Tell her that.”

“Christ,” Darcy says again.  

“I think she wanted him to show up tonight just so she could ambush you both with it, so count yourself in the safe zone. She might bring it up, but only with you, I dunno.” Kate rocks back and forth. “No, I wanted your opinion on something, actually. I told you that there are some new tenants pissing people off on the first floor with noise and stuff, right?”

“Yeah, but I dunno what I can do about it. Unless you want me to file a complaint somewhere, but I’m more civil rights law than anything, it might take me a while to write the whole thing out.” Plus she probably shouldn’t be Kate’s lawyer anymore anyway, as her objectivity is very thoroughly compromised and has been since like…the second time they met up at Mug Shots. “It’s not like I can tell them to bug off, either, I know like…no Japanese other than what you and Yoko have taught me.”

“You strugglebus,” says Kate. “It’s fine. At least your vowels are mostly right. No, I can deal with the noisy tenants on my own, that’s easy enough once Yoko gets back. I’m pretty sure they speak English, but they always pretend not to when I knock on their door and tell them to shut their pieholes. Worst comes to worst I can always drag my Japanese professor out with me and get him to talk to them.”

“You’ve delivered a warning?”

“We’re on warning three if they keep doing noisy shit at two in the morning through next Wednesday. Still, not the point.” The elevator dings, and Kate slinks out. “Remember back when Fisk was doing weird shit out here with this building?”

“Kind of hard to forget.” Darcy realizes she’s rubbing at the scar on her hand again. She forces her thumb away. “Why do you ask?”

“So three weeks ago—no, two weeks, sorry, maybe…three weeks after this new family moved in—the water heater started doing some weird shit, and Elena called a guy to come out and fix it. And he found this. She was going to tell me earlier, but then I was out of town on that thing with Clint, and then everything this past week, and I haven’t been able to come around here until now.” The basement, for the most part, is one room full of washers and dryers (coin operated: New York life, guys) and a side-door labeled _Management_. Darcy’s never been down here before, so she just stands and waits as Kate undoes the lock. “I think before Elena let the water heater repair guy in here it’d been like…two months since anyone came in. It’s mostly just crap from the renovation and old paint cans and shit. And there’s no evidence that the door was tampered with, either, and nothing on the video feed. I think the security camera was looped, though why the hell they’d loop it for something like this, I have no idea.”

Well, this conversation just took a turn for the uncomfortable. “Seriously, Kate, spit it out.”

“Better that you see,” Kate says, and pushes the door open. “Just—go in.”

It’s not April, and Kate had definitely gone overboard with her April Fool’s Day pranks anyway, so Darcy’s like…ninety percent sure this isn’t a joke. Though honestly, it’s also Kate, so there’s always that vague doubt. Still, the lines around Kate’s mouth are like craters, and when she gestures Darcy forward, it’s with wires in her bones. She’s jerky, like a marionette. There are piles of wood up against the wall, a few old plywood pieces propped against the cement like surfboards. A shelf with cans of paint and old rollers. A metal filing cabinet. The water heater and the fuse box. Darcy stops in the middle of the room, and turns around. “I don’t see—”

Oh. Oh, okay. That’s what it is. On the inside of the door—the whole inside wall, actually—someone’s painted Japanese characters. Not spray-painted, but painted, by hand, carefully shaped, as tall as a man and in deep, deep black, standing against the whitewash, something darker than shadow. Darcy shuts her mouth as Kate creeps in, and points to the first one, the one on the left.

“These are easy,” she says. “That’s black. And that one—” she points to the other “—is sky.”

All at once, there’s a buzz in her ears like a nest of hornets. _Tell me what you have found out about the Black Sky,_ Nobu says in her head. She’s digging her nails into the scar on her hand. _Tell me what you have found out about the Black Sky,_ and there’s a man on fire behind her eyes, a dagger hooked up under Matt’s ribs, a drug addict coming at Elena with a gun. _Tell me what you have found out,_ and there’s a killer with a sniper rifle aiming to start a war between the Kobayashi and the Matsuhara, there’s Stick murdering a child out on the docks, there’s the Hudson in her mouth and her hand smashed all to pieces, there’s Nobu’s man Nam Suk Kim vanishing into the ether and the question they’d never had answers to, not really. _Tell me what you have found out about the Black Sky._  

“What the fuck,” Darcy says.

“That’s what I said.” Kate pets at her back. “You look super pale, are you gonna barf?”

“Only if you punch me in the stomach.” Darcy marches up to the wall, and touches the paint. It’s long since dry. “When do you think this was done?”

“No idea. Like I said, it’s been ages since me or Elena have been down here, there wasn’t any need, not until the water heater crapped out.”

 _Tell me what you have found out about the Black Sky._ “Oh.”

“You seriously look like you’re gonna throw up,” says Kate. “I suggest you not look like that by the time we head upstairs, Elena will get worried.”

“You think the new tenants did this?”

“There’s no way to tell, really. Like I said, they moved in a few weeks ago, and this could have been done any time between two months and three nights ago. And it’s not like I can kick them out over the possibility that they might have painted _kurozora_ on the inside wall of the maintenance room, like—that’s not exactly in the rental contract. Well, I mean, aside from defacement stuff, but since I can’t prove it was them, there’s not a lot I can do.”

She has to go up on tiptoe to touch the very top of the kanji for black. Whoever did this was either super tall, or used a stepladder. There aren’t any drops of paint on the floor. “Can we maybe get someone to look at the video feed and see where it was looped?”

“That was my thought. At least it’d mean getting the perpetrators out of the building.” Kate presses her lips together. For a second, she looks eerily like Matt, wrinkled brow and her mouth thin enough to crack. “I don’t like that this is happening on my property. Nobody’s inquired about purchasing the building, no one’s come at me legally, it’s all been copacetic, and then that random water repair guy walked in and found this. I’m really hoping it’s just a coincidence.”

“I’m not sure how coincidental it can be, considering I’m pretty sure half the reason Nobu was working with Fisk was because he wanted to get his hands on this building.” And why that is, she still has no idea. “How common is the phrase _black sky_ in Japanese?”

“I mean, there are other words about weather that are way more common. _Ouame,_ like…monsoon-level rain. _Hinode, akatsuki_ , both of those mean dawn or sunrise depending on the kanji. _Arashi_ for storm. _Niji_ for rainbow. For the sky, though, usually you hear _aozora_ , not _kurozora_. Sometimes _kurai_ , but that’s only if it’s cloudy.”

“ _Kurai_?”

“Dark.”

Darcy rubs at her temples, and looks at the kanji again. “Christ. I think my brain is going to explode.”

“Don’t. I don’t want to clean up bits of your skull.” Kate takes a picture of it with her phone, and forwards it. “So do you want to take this as a clue that the yakuza might be trying to get back in town, or that there’s just some kind of weird clinging-on thing that’s happening here, or—”

“Why would they even do this, though, if they were? What’s the point? Yeah, sure, Black Sky, whatever, why paint it on the inside of a room no one even goes into? If it’s a marker for something, why make it so damn big? If they really wanted to announce anything, why wouldn’t they just spray paint it on a billboard?”

“That’s why I showed you,” Kate says. “It’s just weird.”

They don’t even know what the Black Sky _is._ A child, Matt had said, a kid, maybe eleven, maybe twelve, dead with an arrow in his heart, dirty and chained in a shipping container with a whole contingent of Orihara yakuza to meet him at the docks. A human being? Something carried by a human being? Some kind of drug smuggled in human bodies like heroin mules over the border? But then there would be no reason for Stick to kill the boy, no reason for him to call the child an _it_ instead of a _he_ , no reason for him to murder a kid in cold blood and cast it aside with _that thing wasn’t human anyway._ A weapon, he’d called it. So, what? A bloodline, a breeding program, a virus? A child soldier? Since when does Japan have child soldiers? She can remember, vaguely, that the Japanese army had recruited middle and high school boys into service during the height of the Second World War—the Iron Blood regiments, or something like that—but that had been home service only and more than seventy years ago, now. And even if you throw yakuza dynamics into the mix, she’s still not sure that even applies, not with something like this. “There hasn’t been anything else?”

“Not that I’ve seen.”

She drums her nails against the mark. “Who’s the family that’s moved in?”

“They’re called Ahagon. That’s an Okinawan name, not mainland Japanese, at least according to Yoko. I’ve tried to talk to them a few times, not about this but about the noise thing, and I just get stonewalled.” Kate sucks her teeth. “You think they’re yakuza?”

“I don’t want to typecast, but it might be worth keeping an eye on them just because this—” she taps the wall “—only happened after they showed up. Have you told Elena?”

“I didn’t want to get her involved, not after what happened last time the yakuza came sniffing around here. Still, she’s probably put it together on her own. This isn’t some white dude getting a bad tattoo; it’s not like having kanji splashed on the wall of a building means anything in this neighborhood other than gang bullshit.” Kate heaves a sigh. “I can’t be here all the time. I have class, and then we have Chinatown bullshit, and if I get called in for something with Clint I can be gone for days at a time, it’s not like I can watch the Ahagons twenty-four-seven. And I’m not asking Elena.”

“You could hire someone.”

“Yeah, and have them sniff it out? Not likely.” She bites her thumbnail. “I could always miss a few days. And it really depends on the results of the video footage. If it wasn’t the Ahagons, then we’re kind of back at square one.”

“What about Miles?”

“What _about_ Miles?”

“Maybe ask him to keep an eye on things when you’re not around, I don’t know. He said his mom was a cop, didn’t he?” Like Brett. “He probably has a better idea of how to be stealthy than most people.”

“Just because he supports Sansa Stark for Queen of Westeros doesn’t make him trustworthy.”

“No, but it does make him smarter than the average bear, and Elena likes him. She’s a good judge of character for the most part.” Darcy shrugs. “Not saying you have to do it, just throwing it out as an option. He seems like a good egg. Besides, you don’t have to mention the yakuza thing at all. Just tell him there’s been some graffiti in the basement and to keep an eye on it if he can, but like. Don’t be weird about it.”

“How is that not weird?”

“You’re Kate Bishop, you can think of something.”

Kate chews her lip. “Maybe.”  

Which is Katespeak for _I’ll think about it and then probably say no but at least this way I can say I considered it._ Kate and Matt are more alike sometimes than either of them would like to admit. Darcy presses her scarred palm flat against one of the strokes for _kuroi._ “I think I need to start a new whiteboard. This shit is getting way too complicated.”

“You didn’t already have one?” Kate says. “I have a corkboard of insanity with a bunch of yarn and push-pins. Everything’s color-coded. And it gives me an excuse to buy novelty post-its.”

“Silver lining right there.”

 _Tell me what you have found out about the Black Sky._ She flexes her hand into a fist and then out again. Hironobu Orihara is dead, burned alive in that damned warehouse on the waterfront, he’s not coming back and whatever secrets he had he took to the grave, but just—damn it. _What the hell is the Black Sky, anyway?_

“We should go back upstairs,” Kate says.

“Mm.” She peels her hand away from the paint. “Maybe add another lock to this door.”

“Already working on it.”

“The road goes ever on and on,” Darcy says, and Kate blinks at her.

“What’s that from?”

“ _Lord of the Rings._ ”

“Today’s a fantasy day for you, isn’t it?”

“Seems better than reality.”

When Kate turns the key in the knob, it clicks like snapping bone.

.

.

.

He comes.

Of course he comes. He wouldn’t have been able to avoid it, not after everything today. She wonders if he waited across the street, in a coffee shop or on the corner, until she’d finally clambered out of her taxi and stepped into the elevator. She’d had work to do, tunneling through what she’d been able to scrounge from Roxxon’s mainframe, what files she’d been able to pick up and discard almost as fast. She hadn’t been the one to write the code, or build the bug, but she at least knows enough about computers to be able to wander through the results and create a search program for what she’s looking for. Still, it’s taken her all afternoon to sift through the thousands of documents that spilled right into her hands, and she may, possibly, have stayed out later than necessary just to make him wait. Not a punishment, she tells herself, just a reminder that she doesn’t come when anyone calls, that she isn’t anyone’s pet. She’s the one in control, here. Not the other way around. Elektra’s not entirely sure that he’ll pick up on any of that, not really, but it’s reassuring anyway, for reasons she doesn’t want to look too deeply into.

She leaves the door unlocked. It only takes him fifteen minutes, once she’s through the door. His mouth’s all in knots and he has his hands clenched like he wants to hit her, but he comes, and when she pours herself a drink it’s partly to keep herself from spitting.

“Look,” she says. “You did miss me.”

“What the hell do you want?”

That’s direct, at least. Elektra crosses one arm over her stomach, and then realizes that makes her look weak, like she’s trying to fend off a blow. She drops her hand to her side. “Oh, please. I thought we were through with this part already.”

“What do you _want_?” he says again. There’s something curling, there, something wild, something she wants to scrape her teeth against. _Which I never will again,_ she thinks, just to herself, _because you betrayed me, you destroyed me, and I still hate you for it no matter what else I feel._ She doesn’t even know what she feels. She looks at him and she’s a volcano erupting, spewing everywhere, out of control, all blood and no bone. “You wouldn’t have come back if you didn’t want something.”

“Don’t play the wounded martyr with me, Matthew. It really doesn’t suit you. Never did.” The tequila nips at her tongue, settles. “You seem to get a kick out of it, though.”

He tucks his chin in towards his chest. “Answer the question.”

“I told you what I wanted,” Elektra says. “I wanted your help and you turned me away. I feel like that’s the end of it.”

“You didn’t want my help.” Matthew shakes his head. “You’ve never wanted my help. All you wanted was to see what you could do, you wanted to see what you could play with, but you can’t play with peoples’ lives, Elektra, not like this—”

“You’re one to talk about playing with peoples’ lives.”

“What I do is different than what you do. You just manipulate, it’s all you’ve ever done, you like seeing what you can get people to do, how far you can get them to go—”

“This again.” Her heartbeat’s getting a little too fast for her liking. She breathes, settles it back down. “If you’re going to complain about me giving you something you wanted, you could just say it outright.”

“You think I _wanted that_?” And it’s the same thing, all over again, revulsion mixed with want, his feelings all over his face, useless guilt and shame and disgust and _craving,_ and she’s not wrong, she’s never been wrong, she hadn’t been wrong then and she isn’t wrong now, and her heart is racing with it. “You think I wanted to do that, to murder someone in cold blood—”

“You _did_.”

“ _You don’t know me._ ” She thinks he might break his cane, he’s clenching it so hard. “You thought you knew me and you don’t, you thought you had this—you thought you could see right into my soul, but you can’t, Elektra, you never have—”

“Please.” It cracks out of her, the laughter, snaps away before she can stop it. “You’re fooling yourself.”

“I’m not.” He’s getting back under control, clawing back out of the dark again, reining himself back in. It scrapes at her raw edges, at the scars. “And either way, it doesn’t matter anymore. Whatever little game you think you’ve been playing, whatever problem you have with me, I don’t care—”

“A problem.” It echoes in her mouth. “ _I_ have the problem.”

“—I don’t _care_ ,” Matthew says again, and his hands are in fists and he’s wired, torqued, ready to jump and hurt and break, not wild but leashed, not open but shuttered. “But Elektra, if you bring her into it, I swear to God I will drag you out of here myself and put you on the next flight to Dijon or Barbados or wherever the hell it is that you’ve been the past four years—”

“I never thought she’d be the type to let someone fight her battles for her,” Elektra says. Her molars are shards of glass, cutting into her tongue. “This seems out of character. Unless you’re trying to keep me from telling me something else she doesn’t know, because you haven’t told her much, have you, the pet that you’ve kept safe all this time—”

“Don’t,” he says, very low and rasping, all shadow. “You don’t want to do this.”

“You aren’t like them, Matthew. The people you pretend with, the—there’s something in you, there’s always been something inside of you that you _know_ is different, you know it, the darkness in you that calls and calls and you can’t not listen—”

“Elektra, don’t—”

“You’re like me,” she says. She puts the glass down. “You know it, inside, even if you don’t want to admit it, there’s always been that darkness in you, Matthew, and the rest of them, they can’t understand that, they would never—”

“Stop it.”

“This little game that you have with her, the pair of you playing at house, pretending to be heroes, that’s not who you are, Matthew, it never has been—”

“You don’t know them.” His teeth are a flash of white in the dark. “You don’t know them and you don’t know me, Elektra, not anymore.”

“But I do know you,” Elektra says, and he shakes his head and backs away from her like he’s fleeing acid. “I’ve always known you, what you are, what you want to be, and you can’t do that here, not with her—” 

“ _Leave her out of it._ ”

 _Protective,_ she thinks, _proprietary_ , or some line between the two, and she’d pushed and here he is, but this isn’t anywhere near how she wanted the conversation to go, not at all. She can’t remember when it happened, but it’s all spun wildly out of control, a car skidding off the road, aiming for the tree line. “She can’t understand that, she’s not capable of it, not like you and I—”

“You have no idea,” he says. “You have _no idea_ who or what she is—”

“Don’t I? She’s your leash. She’s always been your leash, whenever—whenever I came too close, whenever you started to remember it, who you are, the darkness inside you, Matthew, you’d go running back to her like a dog, she’s never been anything more than a security blanket—”

He’s panting, hard and fast, heaving like he wants to be sick. “Why did you take me there?” he says, and _snap,_ the trap closes, she has him, she has to— “Why did you take me to that mansion, Elektra, why did you do that, why did you try—”

“Fun,” Elektra says, simply. She’d pushed. She’d thought he was ready for it. She’d thought she could manage it. She’d been young and cocky and stupid and she’d thought he understood, she’d thought it would be a lark, and she’d done it and he’d dropped the knife and looked at her like she was a monster, and it still rips her into shreds inside. _I am not what you think of me. I have never been your nightmare, Matthew._ “I did it for fun.”

“Exactly,” Matthew says. “That’s why you don’t understand, why you—why you _can’t_ understand—”

“Oh, don’t let’s get maudlin, Matthew—”

“Roscoe Sweeney had my father killed,” he says. “And yeah, that night—I thought about it. And maybe I wanted it, more than I want to admit. But I didn’t, because if I had, it would have turned me into him, and that’s not something you can ever— _ever_ understand.”

Elektra stops. They both stop. There’s a razor under her ribs and it’s slicing away all the scar tissue, peeling the wounds open and letting them bleed again. “And she can,” she says, woodenly, because that’s ridiculous. That’s _absurd_. She would have seen it, would have realized it, she _would have_. She wouldn’t have missed something like that. “This marvelously complex little moral jungle you’ve lost yourself in, she can understand it.”

“Yes,” he says, simply. “She does.”

The last stitch is torn out. She’s all carnage and she should taste it on her tongue, because she’s pulp, inside. She’s a mess of torn and battered flesh beneath her ribs. Elektra shakes her head. “You live in a fairy tale, Matthew. She can’t understand you any more than your firm can, that shrinking violet Nelson and your silly little blonde secretary. She can’t understand you any more than she could understand a wild animal. She’s not capable of it.”

For some reason, he doesn’t hiss. He _laughs._ She wants to tear his useless eyes out for it. “You don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. You don’t—” He stops. Tips his head. “Someone’s coming.”

Shit. Here and then gone again, on the hook and then away, and she’s so _angry_ , all at once, even if she hides it, the fury pulsing through her, blood from an open wound. _Soft,_ Stick had called him, _soft and sentimental,_ and he does believe it, she thinks. He believes it, that Darcy Lewis can understand, but that can’t be possible, not truly. Stick would have seen it. _She_ would have seen it, whatever little thing that Matthew’s fixed on, whatever little bedtime story he’s woven for himself: she would have seen it. They would have seen it, one of them. It’s not possible. It’s not _possible_.

 _Work with facts, not fantasies. Figure it out._ For now, at least, she has bigger things to think about. Elektra resettles her robe against her chest, and turns away. “They’re late, if they are. I thought they would have come sooner. Would have saved me the trouble of listening to your fairy stories.”

That he just ignores. “Silencer, in the lobby.”

“Mm.” She wanders into the closet, and lets the robe drop. “Hold my gloves, will you?”

“No.”

“Your loss.”

“They’re in the elevator.” He’s prickling still, like an animal with its ears up, trembling with an energy he keeps leashed. “They’re on their way here.”

“Pity if they get the wrong floor. It would make things complicated.”

“Elektra,” Matthew says. “What have you done?”

_Caught you._

.

.

.

She goes out running that night, because she has to.

Darcy gets back from Elena’s around eleven, and sheds her skin, slips into Lilith and heads right back out again. The rain’s building up again, rolling from the south this time, up the coast like a great black monster, swallowing away the stars. _Tell me what you have found out about the Black Sky,_ and when she looks up there’s the lights of the city reflecting on cloud cover and down below her there are people wandering, creeping through the city, cats and mice. _Tell me what you have found out about the Black Sky,_ and Frank still in the back of her head, _Think it’s something in you_ , Elektra knows who they are and Matt hasn’t come back yet and she can’t think, anymore. She needs to move. So she does, even though she hates running on rooftops, even though the drops between the buildings make her stomach knot and the scuff of her shoes makes her blisters scream. _Move, don’t think._ Darcy runs, runs and runs, with a taser in the holster and a baton in her hand and the knife she’d stolen from Frank Castle tucked in the new strap that Melvin had attached to her costume, a loop where she can slip the sheath. “Not very Lilith,” he’d said again, when she’d asked, but Darcy can’t quite explain it. This is the same sort of thing as the gun she keeps in her purse, the semiautomatic she’d borrowed from Turk Barrett. It’s not something she uses, really. It’s just something she _has._ Not a symbol, but a possibility. _This is mine._ Something she’s claimed from someone else. Not a trophy, not quite. _This is mine, and this is a warning to myself._ Or a reminder. With Frank’s knife, the warning’s obvious. With Turk’s gun, she still hasn’t worked that one out. Maybe just proof that she made a decision, months ago. _I’m Lilith. I’m Lilith and I’m Darcy and I’m Darcy Lewis and I can and will be all three, and I’m not going to let someone take this away from me._

…maybe. That still doesn’t ring quite right. It’s easier not to think about it.

She runs, and when she spots a woman walking home alone she trails her for a while, just to make sure she gets in safe. She should probably be doing something, looking for Finn Brannigan, wandering and asking questions, but she doesn’t have the brain. If she stops moving, she starts remembering, and so she slips into autopilot. She just reacts. She catches two boys winding up to throw bricks through the window of a hardware store, and scares the unholy shit out of them by dropping down off the fire escape. They bolt, thankfully. Down at Daily Daze, over by Central Park (and it’s out of her purview, really, but she still comes here sometimes, for Kate and for Tandy) she catches a drug dealer with a knife to someone’s throat, and snaps his wrist when he tries to stab her in the throat. Which really, she thinks, when he howls, it shouldn’t be as satisfying as it is, to do that.

_Think it’s something in you._

She knocks him out, tells the kid he was threatening to call the cops, and keeps on moving.

She circles, around and around. Back and forth across the Kitchen. It’s a quiet night, and she’s not sure if that’s a relief, or an offense. After the drug dealer at Daily Daze there’s another dealer in the alley behind Mug Shots, and then a random guy—Russian, she thinks, or Ukranian—beating the hell out of his girlfriend in an alleyway. It’s only after that, maybe two in the morning, maybe two-thirty, that she finally settles on a fire escape across from St. Patrick’s Cathedral. She could just go in, she thinks. She could probably go in without anyone batting an eyelash, even in her suit. She doesn’t. She drops down onto the fire escape—long since chilled, though the air is still summer-muggy—and lets her legs swing in midair, winding her arms around the bars and resting her head to the railing. It echoes oddly through the helmet. The scar on her palm is itching. She lasts maybe five minutes before she yanks her glove off, and starts pressing her fingers into the mark, dragging them, trying to scrape away at whatever it is that’s irritating her. It doesn’t help, much.

She wishes she could say she’d come to some great realization there, that something had clicked in her head and suddenly all the shit that’s happened in the past week is behind her and all her problems suddenly make sense, but it doesn’t. Darcy sits and doesn’t think of anything at all, not really, just listens to the city and focuses on how the muscles in her legs are jumping, the way muscles do when you’ve used them too hard and there are still little jolts of energy and electricity staticking under the skin. She sits and listens, and there are cats screaming an alley or two down, and the light’s on in the cathedral—from Father P or from Tandy and Ty or from someone else entirely, she doesn’t know—and she just lets it wash over her, all of it, everything that she’s claimed. _Our city_. Her place. Her people and her place and her world and her job. _Everything I want to protect is here, and I’m not going to stop._

_Tell me everything you have heard about the Black Sky._

Darcy knocks her head to the railing. _Fuck_. Nobu’s dead, and she doesn’t want to think about it. Nobu’s dead, the yakuza have fled into their holes, but her scar keeps itching. She knows it’s in her head, but that doesn’t stop her from pushing her thumb into her palm, from pressing with her nail and trying to scrape it out of her, the feeling, how scared she’d been and how furious, the echo of her own bones snapping and the rage on his face when she hadn’t answered. She’s gone through the files on Leland Owlsley’s computer, found some scant bits of information on Hironobu Orihara. Barely in his thirties, when he’d died. Korean mother, Japanese father. A businessman. _Shateigashira._ But she thinks of him and all she knows is metal in her hand and that single goddamn demand, seared into her marrow. _Tell me everything you have heard about the Black Sky._ And now the Black Sky has been painted on the wall like some kind of QR code for _how to screw Darcy up in three seconds or less_ and it’s nearly three in the morning and she knows if she sleeps she’ll wake screaming even if Matt were there. But she can’t be trapped, can’t sit alone, not boxed inside with the walls closing in. All of it in a week, and it’s too _much_ , it’s too much for any one person to handle, and so she needs to think and feel something else other than overwhelmed. So she sits, and listens to the city, and breathes until Matt comes to find her. 

It doesn’t take him long. She doesn’t flinch when he comes up behind her, touches his fingers to the back of her helmet (glove on leather) and then settles next to her. It’s the same thing they used to do on her fire escape, except now they’re both in costume, and neither of them have secrets anymore. She wets her lips. “How’d it go?”

“Apparently,” Matt says, “she’s pissed off the yakuza.”

“Oh.” Darcy knocks her head to the railing again. “Fabulous. She can join the club, we have jackets.”

Matt folds his legs up under him. “How was Elena’s?”

Of course he would smell that. “It was, uh. It was weird, mostly.” She nearly blurts _Elena wants to know if we’re getting married_ , which is definitely not something to bring up, now or ever. “Someone’s painted graffiti in the basement. That—that thing, that Stick was here for last year. _Black Sky_. Someone was painting about that in the basement.”

Instead of jumping, instead of snapping and snarling and asking _who_ and _why_ and _how_ , Matt just sighs through his nose. He touches his hand to the space between her shoulder blades. “Are you okay?”

“Why wouldn’t I be okay?”

He wets his lips. “I—sometimes you talk. When you have nightmares.”

 _Nightmares or flashbacks or those night terrors that have me awake and screaming for ages before I actually manage to breathe?_ “Oh.”

Matt strokes his fingers along her spine in silence, back and forth over her shoulder blades, to the small of her back where the Templar cross is inked.

“Kate thinks it was yakuza that did it,” she says. “Or someone affiliated with them.”

Matt sighs again. “I don’t like that they’ve built themselves up under our noses.”

“What did Elektra do to piss them off?”

“I’m not sure. She never actually explains herself until she has no other choice.” He knocks his shoulder into hers. “I’m supposed to meet her at a diner tomorrow morning to go over what happens next.”

“You didn’t talk about it tonight?”

“The room was full of unconscious yakuza, it didn’t seem like the right time.”

Darcy hooks her ankles together. “So she’s staying, then.”

Matt doesn’t say anything for a while. When he unfolds his legs, sticks his feet through the railing and swings his boots back and forth next to hers, it’s cautious, more like he’s worried he can’t manage it than worry she’ll tell him to buzz off. “She’s not leaving as fast as I wanted her to, no.”

 _Were you in love with me when you were in love with her?_ It’s arsenic on her tongue. _What about now?_ “If she’s fucked something up, we can’t just leave her. Especially if it’s yakuza. Especially if it’s yakuza who are talking about the Black Sky, because they’re probably Nobu’s old buddies. Especially then.”

“I know.”

 _Clang, clang, clang_ , tapping her head to the railing and feeling the echo. “I just—I can’t keep going into anything blind. I don’t want to go into things not knowing what’s going on, anymore. I hate mysteries.”

 _Clang_ and _clang_ and then something softer. Matt’s slipped his hand between her head and the bars, and when she blinks at him, the corner of his mouth curves a little. “You’ll hurt yourself.”

“Like I haven’t done that before.”

“Doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

That’s true. Slightly hypocritical, but true. Matt leaves his hand on her forehead for a moment, spreading his fingers over the material, glove and the thick layering of the mask. Then he draws back. She doesn’t knock her head into the railing again.

“The yakuza,” she says. “Finn Brannigan and Miss Ninja.”

“It’s not Elektra.” Matt shakes his head. “The woman who was working with Brannigan, it’s not Elektra. I would have been able to tell. I know how she fights.”

“She fights?”

He nods.

“Well, there goes the easy solution.” She turns her head. “Are we splitting this down the middle?”

“Do you want to?”

Darcy knocks into his shoulder. “I want us to do this together,” she says. “Because that’s what—it’s what we’ve always done. Not just the five of us, but—but us two. We’re a team, we do this together.” She steals a look at him. “Unless you don’t want me and Elektra in the same room.”

“I don’t want her in the city at all.” Usually they try, really hard, to keep from touching when they’re in suits. Especially out in the open like this, in a city that glorifies superheroes and vigilantes, where a photo anyone in a mask will get hundreds or thousands of dollars from cheap newspapers and snapshots of two people on a fire escape knocking into each other and pressing closer than they should will get millions of hits in an hour. She still doesn’t pull away when he peels off one glove, and threads his fingers through her bare ones. “But I don’t—if she has to be here, I want you there. With me. I don’t—” He skitters, for a moment, trails into silence. “If it’s just me and her, I remember things.”

She waits for that to hurt, or for her heart to beat faster, but…no. She feels it, all through her, the words. But it doesn’t ache. “Like what?”

He laughs. It’s not one of his silent, happy, Kermit-the-frog laughs, which are so few lately that she can’t remember the last time she saw one. It’s not a Devil laugh, either. This one’s sharp and cutting, all fractured glass. “Things I don’t want to remember.”

Down in the cathedral, someone turns out the lights. Well, in the office, anyway. Another light flickers on a few windows down. Darcy shuts her eyes, and rests her head on his shoulder, on the hard scuff of the armored plating and the warmth of him, even in the still-sticky summer night. Matt unwinds, bit by bit, until he’s leaning back into her, until they’re bracing each other, holding each other up.

“Do you want to talk about it now?” she says. “Or do you want to go home first?”

Matt turns. His chin knocks into her helmet, his mouth. “Here,” he says. “I don’t—not at home.”

She’s nodding, even before he finishes saying it. Elektra’s broken into the apartment once, and the apartment—it’s _theirs_ , it’s their place that they share, and even with every other horrible thing that’s happened in that place (Fisk trying to kill her, for one) she’s not sure that she wants this story in the walls. She doesn’t want to see the memories plastering themselves into the brick. “Okay.”

Matt presses his lips together. The armor’s going to leave patterns against her skin, she thinks. Lines and crosshatching. “I’m not—proud of any of it.”

“I’m not sure I expected you to be.” She lifts her head. “If you’re not sure—”

“Do you not want to hear it?”

“I think I need to hear it,” she says. “I think you need to say it, and I think I need to hear it. And I think that I’m tired of blundering around in the dark.”

Their fingers are still tangled together when he pulls her hand onto his knee, holds it there. Darcy wishes, for a moment, that they could take off the masks, for this. But Daredevil _is_ Matt and she _is_ Lilith and if the suit combines all parts of her, then it does the same for Matt. _You look like you_ , she nearly says again. _All of you, every part._ The suits might be more fitting than she wants to consider.

“Ask me.” He squeezes her fingers. “I’m not sure I can—ask me.”

Darcy shifts, and clocks into him, hip to hip, knee to knee, resting close against his side and shutting her eyes against the city.

“Matt,” she says. “What happened with Elektra? From the beginning.”

Something, some kind of energy, jitters down his spine. He takes a breath, traps it. Sets it free again. She sits, and waits, wishing she could push her thumb into the scar on her palm, wishing she could do something to fix it rather than just sit and listen and absorb. Thirty seconds, a minute, and he breathes. Then he licks his lips.

“When we were bored,” he says, “we used to break into empty houses just to see what was inside.”


	9. Camera Obscura

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So my trip was good, but I managed like...no writing over that week, so that's why this is a few days late. 
> 
> Let me be really clear: Elektra is being presented in this particular light because it's Matt talking, and Matt has his own issues with the whole situation. Not only has Elektra not yet had a chance to tell her side of this, she's being phenomenally aggressive about things (which in a lot of ways she has a right to, but it doesn't endear her to anyone at the moment), and she's...stung as hell. And I mean, a lot of times your first instinct when you hear that someone you love has been hurt because of someone else is to be furious with that someone else, so Darcy's doing way better than I would be in this context. 
> 
> Tl;dr Elektra will get her say and I can't wait for Elektra and Darcy bonding, okay. They're so snarky with each other and just imagine when they _get along_ like the sass would break the world. (AKA, the cafe was my favorite thing to write for this, and possibly for the whole fic so far.) 
> 
> Content warnings: the whole Matt and Elektra debacle, Catholic guilt about queer stuff, rehashing 'I want to kill people' mentalities, some lingering PTSD stuff, Karen Feels.

They don’t sleep, that night.

Matt talks for more than an hour. The only reason she knows this is that when they go home, finally, his arm around her shoulders and hers around his waist, dawn’s breaking. She’d known, she thinks, that it had to have been something crazy, something completely unexpected and awful for a relationship like the one Matt and Elektra had had—a tornado, she thinks, peeling the ground away in its wake—to just…stop. But Christ, _this_ —

(“We’d do what we wanted,” he says, empty, echoing. “It was like—it was like a fever dream. Because I thought she knew what I was. I thought that I knew what she was. It felt like she reached in and pulled my heart out of my chest and bared all the dark places and said, _I know these_. It felt like we were above everything and everyone, and—and I forgot, for a while, that I wasn’t.”)

—she doesn’t know what to think of this.

 _Wild, dark, and snarky. Elektra._ Wild beyond anything she’d ever imagined. Not that she’d led Matt along by the nose, not that she’d put a gun to his head and made him do it, because he’d _wanted_ to do all of it. She’s certain of that. Matt’s never once done anything he didn’t want to do, and everything that happened with Elektra—that was Matt, just as much as it was Elektra Natchios.

(“The rules didn’t matter anymore. Or more like I forgot why I cared about the rules. Because she understood. Or I thought she did.”)

She can remember Matt coming back a few times, always kind of odd, always hiding something, smiling and laughing and just a little sharper, a little more brutal with his jokes and his words, like he didn’t see the point of hiding his thoughts anymore. He’d never once stung her, but Foggy—not intentionally, she doesn’t think, but Foggy’d been hurt by it, and Darcy had snapped, and Matt had snapped back, and it’d been awful every time it happened. Every time, she’d wondered what the fuck his problem was, Matt, what the hell he was doing, but before she could work up the courage to ask he’d always vanish again in another bright, fancy car, and every time it had felt like someone had sliced another piece of her insides away. But in this—no. Her own feelings are beside the point, for this. She needs to understand, not to feel. She sets emotion aside, and just listens to the words, to how he sounds when he says them, bitter, hateful, furious with Elektra, furious with himself.

(“We’d talk about people who hurt us, and what we could do to them if we could. And I was serious, about a lot of it. Not all, but a lot. And—and that night, she put Roscoe Sweeney in front of me. She brought me the man who had my father murdered, like—like a cat does. With dead rats. And she gave me a knife.”)

He’s stiff, on the walk back. Stiff and bruised. Moving like he has arthritis. Darcy thinks of the jittery way he’d been after he’d reappeared, red-eyed and broken on the doorstep of his and Foggy’s dorm, silent about all of it. How he’d flinched when they’d tried to touch him. She’d thought something had hurt him, and yeah, something had, but she’s wondering if he’d thought, back then, that he wasn’t worthy of them touching him.

(“I came back and you both—you didn’t forgive me, but you accepted me. You let me back in, and you never asked why even though both of you had the right to, and all I could think was it might be better if I’d left and never came back. Because I didn’t deserve either of you, not after that.”

“You didn’t kill him, Matt.”

“But I wanted to, Darcy. I _wanted_ it. And—and for a minute I didn’t have a clue why I shouldn’t. For a minute I forgot what—” A ragged breath. “She was never supposed to come back.”)

She lists it out, carefully, in her head. Stolen cars—she’d assumed that, with Elektra. No one other than Tony Stark would have been able to own those sorts of cars. Breaking and entering. Some assaults, nothing on the scale of what they do as Daredevil and Lilith. And Roscoe Sweeney. In the eyes of the law, nothing enormously egregious. To her, nothing too egregious either, especially with how they live their lives, with everything that’s happened since Frank Castle started his bloody work. To Matt…she’s not sure. She thinks the loss of control might frighten him more than anything else about it. Not the edge of murder, but tipping on the edge, falling away from discipline and into raucous, erratic desire. _We’d do what we wanted,_ and the spiral of that, the sweetness of the fall, that would be far more frightening than killing someone, for Matt. No matter how he translates it to himself.

 _I wanted him dead,_ she thinks. Frank Castle, and Oliver Bletchley, and Fisk. _I wanted all of them dead._ And to have Roscoe Sweeney tied up in front of him and to not pull the trigger, _Christ._ She’s not sure she would have been able to do that.

She’s careful, when they get back to the apartment. She’s not gentle, but she’s careful. She strips the armor off him, lets him peel hers away. It’s not sexual at all. He sweeps his fingers over her skin like he’s trying to remind himself of the texture of it, and she braces her hands to his chest over the scars, over his heart.

(“And you never told anyone?”

“I didn’t like thinking about it,” he says. “I didn’t like remembering it. So I tried not to.”)

They’ve both crested close to killing people, since then. She’s not sure about Elektra. (God, she’s not sure what she feels about Elektra. She’s not sure if she wants to fly at her with her nails extended, or trap her in a room and shake her until she explains herself, because killing for revenge, a knife in your hand and the chill of a doorknob against her palm and _this isn’t you, Darcy, detach yourself, think clearly_ —) She’s not sure about Elektra but she knows Matt, and coming that close to the edge—not for justice, not to save someone, but just in revenge, just in hate—it’s no wonder he’s as shaky as he is. She herds him, carefully, pushing him into the middle of the bed and then crawling in behind him, pressing close to his back and looping one arm around his waist. She thinks he might shake her off, but he doesn’t—he quakes, a little, tips his head forward and curls just enough that she can put her mouth to the nape of his neck without too much trouble. He barely ever lets her hold him like this—it makes him uncomfortable, not being able to leap away, having someone pressed up against his back and protecting him instead of the other way around—but when she sneaks her foot between his ankles he traps it there, holding on, hooking his fingers through hers and settling them against his lips. She lies there and she thinks, and he’s still and quiet and empty, almost, as if freeing the words has peeled everything else away from him. Dawn casts odd shadows over the marks on his back.

(“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I don’t—if she stays, I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

“With you?” She swallows. “With us?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you still have feelings for her?” she asks, very carefully. “For Elektra.”

He doesn’t say anything for so long that it’s more than enough of an answer. “I don’t know.”) 

They lie there in silence until the alarm goes off at seven-thirty. It’s only after she’s shut it off and wound around him again, hand on his chest and her lips on the back of his neck, that Matt clears his throat. “I should have told you,” he says. “I should have told you years ago.”

“About Elektra or about the rest of it?”

“All of it.” He presses her foot between his. “I should have just—I should have told you all of it. If you’d known about what I could do, you or Foggy, maybe—maybe I wouldn’t have fallen so deep into it. Maybe I’d have been able to figure it out, faster.”

“Figure what out?”

“That what we were doing was wrong.”

 _Oh, honey._ “Lots of things you could’ve done, or I could’ve done, or she could’ve done. But they didn’t happen, and it can’t be changed.” She shuts her eyes, and breathes, in and out. Warmth and skin and Matt. “I’m glad you told me now. Even with everything.”

Matt settles her fingertips against his lips, clasping her hand and holding on. For the first time in hours, her scar’s not itching at her. It might have something to do with his thumb pushed into the middle of it, but it could be something else entirely.

“It feels like God’s punishing us,” he says. “This past week. For something we’ve done. All of this at once. It feels like a punishment.”

“There could have been better timing on some of it, yes.” Darcy puts her lips to a knob of his spine, and he shivers a little. He’s shivered every time she’s done it, this morning. Like even with her like this, wrapped around him, holding on, every touch is something that’s startling. Like he’s not letting himself expect it, any longer. “Frank could have slept for another month and a half, that would have been cool of him.”

Something whispers out of him that could be a laugh. Darcy puts her palm flat to his chest, and he covers her fingers with his.

“I’m sorry,” he says, very quietly.

“For what?”

“All of it.” He curls again. “I guess.”

Darcy shakes her hair back out of her face, resettles on her side and tucks her nose back into his shoulder. “I’ve known for years it would have been—I don’t know. That something had to have happened. You basically dropped off the map for six full months, I had loads of theories. When I let myself think about it.”

“Did you?”

“Not very often. I didn’t—” She sighs. “It was hard. Not having you there. Foggy and me, we didn’t change, but—but we missed you. And getting dropped, you know, with no warning and no explanation, it hurt both of us. Stung like a son of a bitch.”

He takes a deep breath, and doesn’t let go. “You’re not angry.”

“I was back then. And then you came back, and you were heartbroken, and I didn’t—I guess I funneled it away, like I do every time I get angry. Pushed it into something else. I was—I was really, really angry with you, but I couldn’t shout at you the way I wanted because you were so wrecked, and then it just kind of…you know. It was set aside. And it was four years ago, Matt. I’m—yeah, if I think about it, I’m still pissed, but there’s some distance now.” She shifts, finds another vertebra with her mouth. “And now I have context for all of it. It makes sense, why you didn’t explain it back then.”

He threads his fingers through hers, and shifts when she presses her knee into his leg, trapping her there.

“I didn’t say any of that to send you into a spiral of _I hate myself, I don’t deserve you_ , so don’t,” Darcy says. “I know that’s what you’re doing right now, Matt, don’t deny it. You are a good person who deserves good things because you _do_ good things, you just—occasionally you’re just incredibly stupid.”

Matt coughs again, a hiccupping little laugh. “I mean, you’re not wrong. Entirely.”

“Generally I’m not wrong about you, no.” Darcy shuts her eyes. “You can be stupid and you can be selfish and you can be absolutely ridiculous, but you’re not a bad person and never have been. I wish you’d remember that, sometimes.”

His ribs stutter into a gasping breath, and he shudders again when she swipes her thumb over the back of his hand, across his knuckles. 

“You know what happened with me.” Darcy knocks her forehead into his back. “You know what happened with Eli, and I don’t—I’m not sure I wouldn’t have killed him, if someone had caught Oliver Bletchley and—and given him to me like that. I don’t know what I would have done. Before everything with Frank, maybe—maybe I would have been able to say no, but not now. Now I’m not sure.”

“You wouldn’t,” Matt says, quietly. “I know you wouldn’t.”

“I wanted Frank dead, Matt. I wanted Fisk dead, I wanted Bletchley dead. I still want him to pay for what he did.”

“And you’re still good.” He catches her fingers again, says it into her skin. “We hold each other back.”

 _Me or her,_ Frank had said, and Matt had pulled the trigger, and there’s a flicker of memory, all the way back at the start, after Nobu, after Fisk. _I should have been there to kill him_ and _if you kill him it’ll kill you. Because we’re the same._ “Yeah.”

Christ, she’s so tired. She feels empty. Not quite to the point that Frank had been talking about, not so exhausted that she can’t even breathe, but just—she needs days of sleep and days of recovery. She needs to curl into bed and not get out of it again for a month. Or at least a week.

“If this isn’t a punishment,” Matt says, “I don’t know what it is.”

“A chance for closure,” she says into his spine. “Maybe.”

“I don’t need closure.”

“Whale shark,” she says, and he laughs. He chokes on it, but he does. “She did this, and she left, and you’ve refused to think about it for four straight years. If that’s not unresolved, I don’t know what is.”

“I just want her to leave.”

“And from what you’ve told me and from what I’ve seen, she’s not going to, not until she gets what she wants. Whatever it is.”

The clock, and the city through the window, the buzz of the fan on the floor and his heartbeat under her hand. They can’t stay like this forever, not really. There are too many things to do, too many things they have to finish, but—she feels like a teenager. _Five more minutes._

“What are you thinking?” Lips to the middle of her palm, to the scar in her skin and the marks from Nobu. “You’re very quiet.”

“It’s a lot to process.” And she’s sticking on some parts, to be honest. “Why do you think she did it?”

“For fun.” Matt swallows. “That’s what she said, anyway. For fun. Because she thought it would be fun, to kill someone. Or to get me to kill someone.”

 _Wild. Wild Elektra._ And every time Matt’s verged on killing someone since then, it’s been nowhere close to fun. _She thought it would be fun._

“We walk a line,” he says. “We—there’s a line we won’t cross, either of us. That we can’t let each other cross. Sometimes I think of it like—like falling into a dark hole. And we’re on the very edge, and if we fall, or start to, then we catch each other. Elektra—Elektra pushes other people into the hole. And she—she made sense, when I was with her. Things made sense. Until she gave me the knife, things made sense.”

 _And that’s what scares you,_ she thinks, pressing another kiss to his shoulder. _More than any of the rest of it, that’s what frightens you._ Because if Elektra had made sense up until she’d pressed a knife into his hand, if Elektra had made sense right up until that moment, then—Christ. _Killing someone for fun._ Or for revenge. Fun or revenge and not—not justice or punishment or any of it, just—her mind’s a tilt-a-whirl.

_One batch._

“There’s a monster in me,” he says. “There’s—the Devil’s in me, and I can’t claw him out. There’s a devil inside me and half the time it’s like I’m getting burned up from the inside.”

“If you’re a monster,” says Darcy, “then so am I.”

“You’re not.”

“You’re the one who said we’re the same.”

He fists his hand around her fingers. “Darcy, you’re not a monster.”

“I want the same things you do. I don’t think Grote’s ever going to wake up, after what I did to him. To other people, that’s—that’s monstrous.”

“But you didn’t kill him.”

“Doesn’t mean I don’t think he would have deserved it.” She swallows. “Doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy hurting him for what he did. If you’re a monster, I’m a monster.” 

The blankets shift. When he rolls to face her, it’s with red eyes and a thin mouth, determination and grief. “You’re not a monster,” he says. “You’re the most amazing thing that’s ever happened to me, and you are nothing close to a monster.”

“Then neither are you.” She touches his lips. “If we’re both monsters, then—then it’s not a bad thing, necessarily. Monsters are monsters. Maybe everyone’s a different kind of monster, I don’t know. But you’re not wrong, Matt. You’re not evil, you’re not bad, you’re just…you’re you.”

He shuts his eyes. It takes a few minutes for him to open them again, a few minutes and Darcy tracing lines down his jaw as she waits.

“I’m going to ask you something,” she says. “Not as your girlfriend, but just as—as your friend. As someone who loves you, and wants you to be happy. And I want you to understand that if you answer, it’s not going to hurt me, or break my heart, or make me angry. I’ll—I mean, it won’t be comfortable, but I won’t hate you, no matter what you say, all right? So you can answer me.”

“I don’t like the sound of this.”

“Yeah, well, it needs to be asked.” She considers, for a moment. Then, carefully, she tucks herself into him, nose pressed into the hollow between his collarbones, arms around him so he can’t wrench away from her without getting caught up. “Were you in love with me when you were in love with her?”

He flinches. Actually, legitimately flinches, and his fingers go tight on her hip, and he stops breathing, for a minute. “Darcy—”

“I won’t be angry,” she says again. “If you say yes, I won’t be angry. If you say no, I won’t be angry. It’s just a question. I’m trying to understand, that’s all. You told me that—that you’ve been in love with me since we were freshmen, so I just—I want to understand.”

He’s still, for a while. He breathes, in and out. She thinks he might be timing it, because each inhale is the same length, each exhale. Seven seconds in, eleven seconds out.

“Something’s wrong with me,” he says. “I think—I think something in me is broken.”

“No.”

“Darcy—”

“You aren’t broken.” She shakes her head. “Absolutely nothing about you is broken. If you were—in love with both of us, I mean, that’s—that’s not _wrong_ , Matt.”

“I told myself I wasn’t, but—” He stops. “Every time—every time I started realizing that what we were doing was dangerous, or—or too dark, I would come and find you. She called it—she said you were my leash, and in a way you were, because you—I told you. You make me—you’ve always made me better. Than I am, I mean. You—I’m a better person with you, somehow. And every time I started getting nervous I’d go and find you, because you made it easier.”

She strokes her fingers down his collar. Her heart hurts too much to say anything.

“Just—” He stops again. “People aren’t supposed to be able to do this.”

“What, love two people at once?” There’s a scar on his shoulder from Nobu. When she puts her mouth to it, he tastes like salt and sweat and skin. “People can do that. I know people who have done that. It’s not wrong. It just—it means you have a huge goddamn heart, that’s all.”

“I shouldn’t care,” he says. “At all. I shouldn’t—she nearly destroyed me. I should hate her. Or more than that, I should—I should be indifferent, I shouldn’t care, but—”

“But you do.”

Matt shakes his head. “I don’t know.”

“If you care?”

“I don’t know, maybe.”

“Grooves,” she says. “In your head. You’re always going to care. You were in love with her, and no matter what she did, no matter what she asked you to do or thought you were capable of, you’ll have feelings. Feelings aren’t something you can help, Matt. They—feelings grow and change and we _can’t_ crush them. People say we can, but God, poetry wouldn’t exist if that were the case. If we could kill feelings, then half the masterpieces in the world would never have been created. More than. We’d live in a world without—without Shelley or Van Gogh or Dostoyevsky or Plath and that’s just a sad thought, to me.”

“Of course you pick Plath.”

“I love Sylvia Plath.” She presses closer into his chest. “After Eli, she was one of the only people who made sense. Like…ever. I don’t know.”

“Really?”

“ _I like people too much, or not at all._ ” Lips to his collar again, to the dip in the bones. “And _I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow._ ”

Matt shifts around, rolls onto his back, lifts his eyes like he’s searching for the ceiling. “Shadow?”

“Christ, I don’t—hold on.” She has to think. “ _I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people’s eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth_.”

“You remember that?”

“You kidding? I used to write it in my school notebooks all the time, _shadow at the back of people’s eyes and smiles_. It was the only thing I’d ever read that ever felt like me, and I know how stereotypical that is, believe me. It scared the teachers because they knew it was from _The Bell Jar_ and that’s about someone struggling with depression and considering killing herself. So.”

He’s quiet. Darcy rests her head on his shoulder, and smooths her fingers back and forth over the scar in his side from the fight with Nobu, back and forth and back and forth, from tip to tip. It takes him a while before he rests his fingertips to her shoulder, leaves his arm around her, listening.

“Nothing is wrong with you,” she says again. “What you do doesn’t just come from anger and viciousness, Matt, it comes from how deeply you care about people. You want to protect the city because you love the city, and the people in it, and you’re not just—neither of us are doing this just to hurt people. We do it because if we stop, people get hurt. The violence is its own cause and consequence, but it doesn’t negate the love.” _Deep breath, Lewis._ “Just like loving one person doesn’t negate loving the other.”

“I don’t love her anymore.”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t change the fact that you were in love with two people at once, and one of them hurt you very badly, and now she’s back, and it’s freaking the hell out of you. The polyromantic thing was probably scaring you shitless did back then, too, just—you didn’t think about it the same way because you didn’t need to. Or you didn’t let yourself.”

He shakes his head, disbelieving. “How are you being so calm about this?”

“I went to the Queer Caucus meetings at Columbia, remember? I’ve talked about this with people before.” Her chest squeezes tight. “Not that I’m going to be like—a hundred percent behind the idea, just because it seems like it’s hurting you more than anything and to be honest I didn’t…factor in the idea of non-monogamy into this—”

“Darcy—”

“Let me finish,” she says, and he shuts up. _He listens to you_ , Foggy had said, _the way he doesn’t to anybody else, that I can tell,_ and who the fuck knows why he does it. Maybe because they’re so similar, him and her. Maybe because he trusts her with his back and he knows they’re the same and so his secrets are more easily prised out of the shell than they would be for anybody else. No matter the reason, she’s glad of it, right now. That he’s actually processing, not just letting the words wash away. Because this _means_ something, what she’s saying. She means every word of this. “It isn’t something I expected. And I don’t know that I like hearing it, really. That there could still be feelings, there. But—I mean. If there are, that—that doesn’t mean something is wrong with you. And, y’know—” _honesty time, Lewis, come on_ “—I’d probably be stuck in the same boat. If it were me and you and someone else.”

Matt’s quiet for a long time. He strokes his knuckles down her shoulder and back up again, a circuitous rhythm that would lull her to sleep if she weren’t waiting for an answer, if she weren’t wrapped up in her own thoughts. Finally, he puts his mouth to her scalp. “Really?”

“Mm.” She doesn’t really know how to say it well, but…whatever. “Like—I can’t actually imagine not. Loving you, I mean. So it’s just—if it were me, and I was with someone else—loving them, or—or having feelings for them, and you came out of nowhere like this, then I’d kind of be stuck. In the middle.” Darcy wrinkles her nose. “Seems like a shitty position.”

His arm goes tight around her shoulders. Matt tucks his nose into her hair.

“You said you don’t trust yourself around her.” She curls her hand up over his heart. “You said that you don’t feel comfortable being around her, that you—is it because of the feelings or because of what nearly happened?”

“Jesus, you don’t pull punches.”

“Of course I don’t. You’ve known that for years.”

Matt heaves a huge breath. “I don’t—it’s not—I mean.”

“English.”

“Is difficult,” he says.

“You could say it in Spanish, if you want.”

“I’ll bite you.” Still, he doesn’t lift his lips from her hair. “I don’t—I can’t actually emphasize enough how much I _don’t_ want to start something with her. Now, or ever. After what happened, I don’t—”

He stutters out, back into silence, bracing his arm around her shoulder and holding her close enough that it almost stings. Her glasses jam into her nose. Darcy angles until she’s resting half on his chest, her cheek flat to his shoulder, still, but when she breathes, in and out, it’s a rise and fall, it’s her pressing him into the bed and making herself present and a quiet plea, _I’m right here, you’re all right._ Matt rests his palm to the back of her head, swallowing, convulsive.

“Tell me.” She traces the scar again. “You can tell me, you know that.”

“I know.” His heart is racing under her chest. “I don’t—if she stays, I don’t trust myself not to fall into the dark again. She—it took months, after. To build control back up, to—to remember who I was and what I wanted. I don’t trust that it won’t happen again, if—if she’s nearby. Even if nothing happens. Which nothing will, because I don’t—I don’t want it to. Not her, not—not any of it.”

“Losing control.”

He nods. Darcy props her chin up against his chest, looking at him.

“You said that you wanted me to stay with you,” she says. “If you have to talk to her. Is that why?”

“You don’t have to worry about her and me.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

He settles his thumb to the corner of her lips. “We work together. And if you’re there, it won’t—it makes things easier if you’re there.”

“So I stay with you,” she says. “If you don’t want me to leave you alone with her, I won’t. And I know—I _know,_ for a fact, that you love me, Matt. I know that. That was never, ever in doubt. Not for me. I know you love me, and—and I do love you. Even with everything this past week, that hasn’t changed.”

Something cracks in his chest, vibrating into her lungs. “I know that. I don’t know why you do, sometimes, but—but I know that.”

“I love you because I love you.” She kisses his collarbone. “I love you because you’re obnoxious and because you’ve been my best friend for eight years and because you make that stupid scrunchy face when I pull your earlobe and because you help me remember good things in the world. I told you, when we were staying at Claire’s, after—after Fisk. That I can’t, um. You know all the pieces of me that—that I hate. And you care anyway. You understand me anyway. You know them, and you—you love me anyway.” Darcy bites her lip. “I don’t know if that’s the right thing to say right now, considering, but—I don’t know.”

She really, really loves seeing his eyes. She’s never really been able to articulate it properly, even to herself, what it means that he’ll take his glasses off around her. That he doesn’t hide, with her. That he reaches out knowing she’ll be there. That when they’re talking she can look up and see him blink at her and he’s never self-conscious of it. Matt threads her hair back up out of her face, paints his fingers down her cheek. “I don’t know what you see in me.”

“You,” she says, and kisses his mouth. “I see you, that’s all. I don’t know why it’s so hard for you to believe it, but I see you, and you don’t scare me. You never have.”

Another laugh, crackling. It’s honest this time, though. Matt fists his hand up against the blankets. “I don’t know what I did to deserve someone like you.”

“It’s not a point system. You don’t deserve anything. I don’t deserve anything. We chose.” When he rests his fingers to her lips, Darcy lets herself smile, just a little. “We chose, and this is what happened. I know that might break your Catholic brain, but in my mind, nobody gives out prizes. We’re just people, and we make choices, and the pair of us made choices that led us to this. That’s all.”

He doesn’t smile. Matt strokes her cheek again. When she rocks forward, tips into his mouth, it’s delicate. Shattered crystal. Fingers in her hair, skin beneath her palms. She presses a kiss to his chin, and says, “When are we supposed to be out the door?”

“There’s that diner down the street from the firm. I told her eight-forty-five, but she probably won’t be there until nine.”

“No watch?”

His mouth twists. “Never cared.”

“Ah.” _Wonder how that works out with meetings with Roxxon._ “Well, if it’s Rosetti’s, then I can buy banana pancakes. It’ll make up for not having slept. Though I really shouldn’t be buying pancakes until we at least know that we’re going to be able to pay rent, this month. I’m—kind of regretting not being more Slytherin and keeping the money she threw at us. It was mercenary and gross and basically blackmail but, y’know. It would have pulled us out of debt.”

“Really?” 

“I snuck a look at the transaction records when Foggy wasn’t looking, and yeah, it would have.” Darcy kisses him again, quickly. “We both smell like suit. Come on. Shower.”

Normally he’d flirt. Normally he’d say something like, _if I must_ , and trap her against the door to the bathroom and make it difficult to remember what the plan had been in the first place. This time, though, he just takes her offered hand, and that more than anything else she’s learned tonight makes her want to snatch up her baton and aim it at Elektra’s head. Still, she bites her tongue. _Think._ If she’s learned anything in the past week, if it’s made her remember _anything_ , it’s that people are complicated. That they have reasons, they have problems. That each person is a universe unto themselves. _I turned around,_ he’d said. _And she’d vanished._

She’s not entirely sure what’s happened, in her head. She feels even, a boat on still water. Underneath the surface all of it’s churning, wild, but for now things are steady. _Like a cat,_ he’d said, _with dead rats_. Elektra in their living room. _I’ve found that breaking windows is simpler._ But she can’t shake it, the feeling that there had been bruises dancing around Elektra’s mouth, old bloody wounds on both of them. Matt’s a wreck. What does that mean for Elektra?

 _Christ._ Foggy’s rubbing off on her. Darcy turns her face up under the showerhead, and tries to drown in the spray.

Matt’s not wrong. It’s nearly nine-thirty by the time Elektra comes in, and she doesn’t stop or pause or even flinch when her eyes catch on Darcy in the booth next to Matt. There’s that flickering around her mouth, though, shadows chasing each other under the skin, and in Darcy’s head, Plath pops up again. _Still and empty, the way an eye of a tornado must feel._ She’s not sure if Elektra’s the eye, or the tornado itself, but the expression’s gone in a second. Something sour roots itself into her throat, looking at her. _You broke his heart and scared him out of his mind and you don’t get forgiveness, for that, not from me._

“You good?”

Darcy hooks her fingers through Matt’s under the table. “I’m fine. Don’t let her bait you.”

“Shouldn’t I be telling you that?”

“Don’t get sassy with me.”  

“And good morning to the pair of you,” Elektra says, and slides into the opposite side of the booth. Her lipstick is a gorgeous shade of coppery red that Darcy’s too pale to ever be able to pull off. “We missed you last night, didn’t we, Matthew? Could’ve used you in the fight.”

“You seemed to handle it fine.” Darcy knocks her knee into Matt’s, and leaves it there. If Elektra’s going to play this as carefree indifference, that’s a thing Darcy can do. “Not a scratch on you, by the look of it.”

“Please. Under the clothes I’m a disaster. Not as bad as it could have been, but there are still some nasty bruises.” Elektra shrugs. “I’m starving, what did you order?”

“Pancakes.”

“Brilliant.” She waves down the waitress, her bangles clicking against her wrist. “I dealt with them, by the way. They won’t be bothering anyone again.”

Matt goes stiff, next to her. “You killed them?”

“Was there another option?” Elektra’s eyeing the remaining bits of whipped cream on Darcy’s plate like a woman who hasn’t had a scrap of food in fifteen years. _Whatever._ Darcy shoves her plate across without a word, watching the drag of her thumb across the ceramic. She’s not sure if Elektra even thinks about it. She’s always been one of those people with sexuality dripping from their fingertips. “They were yakuza, they would have come after me again with the way you left them, even the one with the crack in his skull. Which was efficient, by the way, very neat. I could’ve done better, but then again, we can’t all be me.”

 _Jesus Christ._ “I’m—um.”

“Do I scare you?” Elektra’s not angry, she doesn’t think. Curious, more like. “It’s all right if you are. I won’t think any less of you.”

“You puzzle me,” Darcy says. “More than anything.”

“ _I hear such different accounts of you as to puzzle me exceedingly,_ ” Elektra says, pleased. She sucks at her finger, and then says, “Besides, it’s not as if they weren’t going to head right back to their little holes and work on new ways to make all the _innocent people_ in this city wish they were dead.”

That may, possibly, have been the most cynical, sarcastic thing Darcy’s ever heard in her life, and that’s _her_ talking. “Do I want to know what you did with them after?”

“Please. I’m not sloppy. There won’t be an investigation. I doubt the bodies will even be found.”

“Christ,” Matt says. “This was a mistake.”

“Matt, let her finish.”

“Talking about killing people?”

“Explaining herself,” Darcy says, and slowly Matt sinks back down into his seat. Elektra’s watching this with blatant interest, her eyebrows marching up her forehead, lips curving. “Because she’s going to finish explaining herself.” 

“Listen to the woman, Matthew, she at least seems to have a streak of common sense.” Elektra swipes her finger over the plate again. “This city’s a shithole. I forget it every time I leave, get nostalgic, and then I come back and wind up disappointed all over again. Why any of you stay here, I have no clue.”

“It’s a shithole,” Darcy says, “but, y’know. It’s our shithole." _Thanks, Foggy._ "Our expensive, crime-ridden, rapidly gentrifying, nasty-smelling shithole. But Lin-Manuel Miranda has it right, when the sunrise hits the fire escapes the right way? Most beautiful thing in the world.”

Elektra presses her finger to her lips, watching Darcy through her eyelashes. “I’ll take that into consideration, then. And don’t,” she says, when Matt opens his mouth. “I don’t talk about anything until I eat. We don’t all get to vanish into the ether and leave the mess for other people to clean up.”

“I wasn’t—”

Darcy jabs her thumbnail hard through the fabric of his slacks. Matt shuts up, and turns his face towards the window. If Elektra notices, she doesn’t say anything. She just flags down the waitress.  

The fifteen years thing might have to be upped to _hasn’t eaten since birth_ , because the amount of food Elektra orders, Christ. Pie, a sandwich, two different kinds of tea plus coffee (which she gestures at all of them, for that one, and Darcy’s not sure what to make of that) a salad, a side of onion rings, _and_ fries. Which…damn. Okay. Darcy wants fries now. So, yeah, after all of that (plus Darcy’s fries) is delivered to the table, and Elektra’s made more than a few decent attempts at conquering her enormous club sandwich (complete with razing all cities under its dominion to the ground) Matt leans back against the vinyl of the booth. “Are you done?”

“Only halfway.” Elektra’s lips curl. “But I can talk, now, probably. So long as I get to pause.”

Literally all the sass at this table right now, Jesus. Sass and baiting and teenage grumpiness. She hooks her foot around Matt’s ankle. _I get that you’re freaked out, but please don’t get snippy._ Darcy wipes salt off her fingers from the fries. “I don’t remember you being this chipper.”

“Please. Isn’t this a fascinating morning? Daredevil—” she’s quiet, but Matt still jerks like she’s hooked him up to a car engine with jump cables “—and Lilith, and me, and no one in this café knows but us. Oh, don’t get fussy, Matthew, I’m not shouting it from the rooftops.”

“Elektra,” says Matt, through his teeth. “Keep your voice down.”

“Like anyone’s paying attention.” Elektra picks the tomato out of the remainder of her sandwich, and eats it. “You could probably put on a shirt that says _I’m Daredevil_ in all capitals and wear it through Times Square and nobody would believe me. Take a pill.” She eyes Darcy, for a moment. “You’re a harder sell, especially with all those cuts, but I’m fairly sure enough people in this neighborhood know you and would be the first to cry _no, not her_!”

Thinking of Marisol, of Brett, of everyone who’s linked her to Lilith in the past few days, Darcy snorts.

“You wanted to ask me questions, didn’t you, Matthew?” Elektra steals a fry off of Darcy’s plate, and lifts her eyebrows in a challenge. “Or did you miss me?”

“That would be a no.” He presses his knee hard into Darcy’s under the table. “I want to know what you’re doing here, Elektra. The truth, this time.”

“I told you, Roxxon has my money wrapped up in their bullshit. I want it back.”

“And they called in the yakuza for that?”

“Roxxon’s had their child-slaving fingers wedged into criminal pies for decades, is it really so surprising that the Japanese subsidiary of their conglomerate is tangled with the yakuza?” She picks another tomato out of her sandwich. Darcy thieves a fry of her own, and refuses to acknowledge Elektra’s eyebrow game a second time. “I stirred the pot, they came running. It’s not particularly complicated.”

“You could just, you know.” Darcy snaps the fry in half. “Pull your funds out of Roxxon. They can’t possibly have it so twisted that you can’t divest yourself as a board member. And it would get the yakuza off your back if you did.”

“I’m not a board member, my father was, which tells you enough about my father.” She blows hair out of her eyes. “I don’t run from a fight, and they’ve started one. I hacked into their servers, and they came with knives.” Elektra hums a few bars of the IAMX song, and licks mayonnaise from her finger. “There’s something here that they don’t want anybody to see. We have to track it down before they bury it again.” 

“We,” Matt echoes. “There’s not a _we_ , here.”

“Of course there’s a we. If there wasn’t a we, the pair of you wouldn’t be here.” She stirs the ice in her glass with the straw. To be irritating, Darcy’s pretty sure. She can’t see any other reason for it, especially when Matt’s this on edge. “Of course, I’d rather deal with it alone, but you—” She looks at Matt. “You’re the best fighter I know. And you—” She actually pulls the straw out of the cup, points at Darcy “—you’re learning, and thus can be tolerated.”

“Much obliged.”

“You’re welcome,” Elektra says. “I’m not stupid enough to turn down backup if it presents itself. Not that I don’t appreciate all the time and attention, but you wouldn’t have come to meet me if you hadn’t already decided that much. It’s not particularly difficult to deduce.”

“Thanks, Holmes,” Darcy says.

Elektra tips her head. “Jonny Lee Miller or Benedict Cumberbatch?”

“Jeremy Brett. Also not the point.”

“We can handle the yakuza.” Next to her, Matt clenches his hands up on his knees. “We did before.”

“No,” Elektra says, “you can’t. And no, you didn’t. They’ve been here waiting, that much is clear. They’re here with something more permanent in mind than just crossing me off the map, as flattering as it is that they think they need to send eight of their best people to subdue me. They didn’t give my father the same courtesy.”

“Your dad was an antiquities professor.”

“Among other things.” Elektra knocks the ice around again. “Richer than Croesus, and a selfish bastard to boot.”

“Sure,” Matt says. “Hard life for you.”

“Oh, don’t go on one of your proletarian rants, if you can manage it. I know sometimes it’s hard for you to keep your mouth shut, but I’m not in the mood for it, this morning.”

“Children,” Darcy says, and under the table Matt steps on her foot. _If you’re going to be snotty, I’ll be snotty back at you, Matthew, don’t get mad at me._ Getting snippy isn’t going to help them get anywhere. More flies with maple syrup than with arsenic, or whatever it is. “We’ve established your dad was a bastard, fine. So was mine, he left before I was born. If there’s going to be a we, there are ground rules.”

“Oh, Lord,” says Elektra. “How hard am I going to roll my eyes?”

“We don’t kill.” Matt crosses his arms over his chest. “No more bodies drop, no more—no more _accidental_ deaths. We don’t kill. If you work with us, neither do you.”

“Well, you don’t kill _intentionally_ , of course. Thin distinction, but fairy tales are your habitat, I’m not sure I’m surprised—”  

“No more killing, Elektra,” says Matt, in a voice that brooks no argument, and Elektra actually shuts up. She scoffs under her breath.

“Fine. Kid gloves back on.” She peeks through her eyelashes. “You used to be fun.”

“Second rule,” Darcy says, loudly, over whatever aborted snarling sound Matt’s making right now. “We work together, we actually, you know, _work_ together. Instead of sniping at each other like a bunch of teenagers. That absolutely has to be a thing, because if I have to listen to it for as long as this goes on then I will actually stab someone.”

“I thought we just clarified that the two of you don’t go in for that.”

“Again, not the point.” Darcy picks over her fries. It’s easier to do that than to look at Elektra, or at Matt, easier to do that then feel like a hypocrite when Elliot Grote is lying in a hospital bed and probably never going to wake up. _And he deserved it_. “No killing. No sniping.”

“No sex,” Elektra says.

She has to bite her tongue to keep from choking on it. “What did I say about no sniping?”

“It’s not a snipe if it’s the truth.” Scratch the _Elektra’s not conscious of it_ thing. She totally flaunts it. “You can’t deny that we’re all very pretty—”

_All?_

“—and with fighting, especially the way we do it, sometimes it doesn’t feel like there’s any other outlet.” She considers her plate. “Well, that or pie.”

“That’s a very Faith Lehane outlook on life,” Darcy says. _Do not react. Do not react to Elektra Natchios possibly suggesting a threesome, even in jest, because Jesus Christ, if you react—_ “I don’t bake, telling you that right now. So if you want pie, you buy it.”

“Is that your line in the sand?”

“Close enough to one that it’ll stick.” Darcy knocks into Matt. “You good with that?”

His jaw clenches. _Come on, Matt._ Darcy touches his knee again, and he catches her fingers in his, not squeezing, just holding on. “Fine.”

“Excellent.” Elektra drags a bit of apple out from her pie, and mashes it with her fork. “And the trend of you both being absolute sticks continues. If you can avoid it, try not to be overtly vile, the pair of you. The domesticity is bad enough.”

“What part of _don’t go there—_ ”

“Sniping,” Darcy says. “It’s not happening. Check yourselves before you wreck all of us. Besides—Matt, we have to get to work, come on. Karen will be pissed.”

“Is that the secretary?”

“That would be the secretary and the legal assistant and the Queen of Nineties Tech, yes.” And the Dog Tamer. And the Gun Wielder. And the Secret Weapon, which she’s not telling Elektra. She pushes Matt out of the booth. “You already have my number, so call if you need.”

“Looking forward to it already,” Elektra says, and Darcy pushes, pushes and pushes without being too obvious about it, until she’s hustled Matt out the door with about as much ceremony as throwing a sack of rice, hand woven into his. She thinks Elektra might watch them as they go, eyes trained to their backs. There’s a prickling up her spine that can’t be explained by anything else.

“Jeremy Brett?” he says, when they’re half a block away and his shoulders have dropped from around his ears. “When was Jeremy Brett?”

“Eighties and nineties. Granada specials.” Darcy squeezes his fingers. “You good?”

“Hah.”

“Reword: are you going to punch anything or anybody in the next hour?”

Matt bumps into her shoulder. “Probably not. Unless one of the clients gets too obnoxious.”

“Let’s hope that they don’t, then.” She sighs. “And let’s hope that nothing crops up for like a month so she gets bored and leaves.”

.

.

.

They get two weeks.

It’s actually fairly easy, all told. Back to what they’d been doing before, the balance between the law and the night. She still falls asleep at her desk more than a few times, still dozes off and wakes up to find Rey crawling back into her lap (because Karen brings Rey to work, “she’s too young and scared to be left alone all day and besides, Chat found me a service dog vest, we can pull it off—”) and curling up the way Darla does. Six more students from the Manhattan School of Music call in to ask about the suit she’s filed for Marisol Guerra. They settle with Maxwell’s nemesis, though, get the charges dropped, and actually get paid. Miss Jacinto is more complicated, since her immigration status is precarious at best, but she’s pretty sure Matt makes inroads on that. He seems pleased when he comes back from court, anyway, and it’s an improvement over everything else that’s happened.

Still, she lies awake staring at the ceiling when they get back from the city, listens to him breathing, and thinks, _how do I do this?_ Blow after blow after blow. Broken promises and exes out of nowhere and she knows for a fact that he would never, ever cheat on her, but she’s still not sure she can trust him not to rush ahead of her if it meant he could get Elektra out of here as soon as possible. He’d asked what he could do, to prove it to her, but she’s honestly not certain. She thinks existing might be the only solution.

Maxwell closes, more cases open up, but outside of MSM the firm’s quiet. The whip that she’d sketched out with Melvin is proving trickier than expected. “He’ll call you,” Betsy says, “when it’s ready,” and she’s good with her taser and the baton for now, anyway. Now that the semester’s actually really started, Kate has to be in at Barnard most days, and that means she doesn’t show up quite so often at the firm. The looped video was deleted, or removed, according to Santino (and Darcy should’ve known that Kate would get Santino on the case; Kate and Santino are good friends, from what she can tell) which means there’s no way to tell who broke into the maintenance room and painted _Black Sky_ on the inside. It’s stumping Matt, too. “It’s like they’ve wiped all the scents out of here,” he says, when he touches his fingers to the wall a few days later. “Like—all I can smell in here is you, and Kate, and Elena. And the paint. There’s nothing else here.”

“Because of how long ago it happened?”

“Maybe, but the paint is still strong. There should at least be something.” He shakes his head. “There’s nothing here to find.”

Which is back to square one there. Still, Elena’s recruited Miles, even if Kate had hesitated. There are people watching the Ahagons. Hopefully it’ll give them something eventually.

She doesn’t hear anything from Jen. Neither does Karen, really—they’re both out of the apartment so much it’s a miracle that Darla is still eating properly—but even though Darcy texts her a few more times, there’s no reply. _Never thought Jen would be the type to pull the “seen: 2:41PM” thing._ Judging by how the courthouse is buzzing every time she has to visit, though, the DA’s office is working overtime to build the case against Frank. It’s more than possible Jen’s not actually ignoring her, just that she doesn’t have enough brain outside of evidence to respond. “Leave the toucan be,” Angie says, one morning when Darcy comes in with more coffee and another complaint to file against MSM. “She’s having a hard time of it, lately.”

Christ. She’s such a shit sister. Darcy steals a post-it off of Angie’s desk (“Watch it, peregrine, I don’t like you that much—”) and scrawls _tell me if you need anything –D_ onto the paper. “Give that to her,” she says, and smacks it onto a pile of case files. “Or stick it on her computer or something, somewhere she’ll see it.”

“If I must,” says Angie, but she looks grimly pleased anyway. “If you could come back in a few hours to drag her out of that damn office, it might help.”

“You think she’ll actually come along this time?”

The expression on Angie’s face is the only answer she needs.

Frank is still asleep. Claire texts them updates, on occasion, just says _nothing yet_ and doesn’t respond when Darcy tells her thank you. They’re keeping him under sedation until some of the more dangerous injuries have resolved themselves a little. It’s an impressive list. Strain on his heart, from what Claire can only guess was four different tasers. Possibly more. A drill through his foot, a shattered knee ( _oops,_ ) internal damage from whatever else Brannigan was doing. One or two missing molars, in the back of his mouth. Plus all the fractured bones, the broken nose, the cuts, and even a few burns, though from what the nurses haven’t been able to gather. “He made bombs,” Darcy says into the phone one night, perched on the corner of a rooftop with Kate and watching Matt beat the shit out of an Irishman. ( _he shouldn’t be out here, he needs to rest, his stupid head and his brain and the hearing, God,_ because he’s still having hearing issues even if he’s pretending otherwise, she _knows_ , she can tell—) “It might have been from that.”

“That would explain chemical traces the labs found.” Claire heaves her _God, why did I end up with you people_ sigh. “I have more names for you.”

“I’ll call you on my way to court tomorrow, can you tell me then?”

“Sure.” Claire hesitates. “You don’t need to keep doing this to yourself.”

“I need to know, Claire.”

“Need to know what?” Kate says, next to her, and Darcy shrugs.

“Nothing, just girl stuff.” And she’s really hoping Matt isn’t paying attention right now. “I’ll call you tomorrow, Claire.”

“I’ll hold you to that one,” Claire says, and she’s the one to hang up.

She has her timelines, at least. Sketching everything out. Which is exceptionally dangerous, considering what she does, and who she is, but Kate’s right—she can’t keep track of all of it in her head anymore, no matter how interwoven it is. Her brain’s never worked in anything but mind maps, and mind maps are best drawn on whiteboards, and whiteboards—she has a whiteboard. Not a little ones that you can get for like…games of Jeopardy or whatever, but a huge one, one that both Matt and Foggy had been surprisingly okay with installing into the wall of her and Matt’s office even if it meant two weekends fighting with the plaster and Kate finally swooping in and paying for half of it like some kind of money pixie. The Redwood of Whiteboards, essentially, with a lock to make sure nobody can get past the first two layers without mugging her dead body.

The outer two layers, those are for work, nothing confidential, just reminders and phone numbers and phrases from opening statements. For the most part it’s not overwhelmingly filled, and she erases it a lot, especially when new clients come in to talk to her or to Matt. The second half—the inside of the card, the part she keeps locked up? That’s all nightwork. In Spanish, half of it, and bits of Russian she still can’t quite shake out of her head, and even then she gives everyone nicknames, but, you know. It works. She hasn’t had time the past week to erase things and write it all out. As soon as they get to work after the breakfast with Elektra, though, she’s out of her shoes, her heavy-duty headphones on, and at the board, because otherwise she’s not going to be able to keep everything straight in her head.  

Three pieces. Far left, Frank Castle. That gets split in half, because there’s Frank Castle Now, today, murder and mayhem and shotgun shells in the street, and then there’s Frank Castle Before. Karen and Ben are taking the lead on that one. She’s not gonna lie and say she’s not a little relieved about that, that she doesn’t have to preoccupy herself with it in the face of everything else she’s handling. Not that she doesn’t want to know what the DA is hiding, not that she doesn’t want to know why it happened, but she’s being pulled in a million directions at once at the moment, and leaving that part of the investigation to Karen and to Ben—she’s okay with that. _Jarhead_ , she writes on the board. For Frank, obviously. Then _Vulture_ for Ben and _Eurydice_ for Karen. (She feels a little twisted, writing that one down, but it’s the only thing she can think of, Orpheus and Eurydice and leading each other out of hell. Elektra’s damn name keeps making Greek myths pop up in her head.) _Prior_ for the DA mole, just because she likes the word. Then there’s Reyes (she doesn’t even try with this one, just scrawls out _Cersei_ and moves on with her life), and Reyes—ugh. Reyes is a problem that they can’t touch, without evidence. _Tibbs,_ she scrawls, and underlines it. Brett and whoever the mole is, that’s their way in.

 _Which you are leaving to Karen._ She underlines Tibbs again, and Eurydice and Vulture. _You are leaving this to Karen and Ben, Darcy._

And speaking of Sergeant Tibbs, there’s the whole Willie Lincoln issue. _Honest Abe,_ she writes, at the top of the middle column. She’s still only just scratching the surface of the cases Willie Lincoln was involved in, but it’s been upped from three to five to nine counts of first degree murder, though legally every case has been shot with so many holes that a 1L would be able to get it through out of court. He’d been good at his job, Willie Lincoln, kept his prints off and had good alibis, even if they were bullshit. The only thing anyone might have been able to nail him on was conspiracy to commit a fraud, and even that wouldn’t have panned out if the defense attorney or the public defender had been worth their salt. Nine dead bodies so far, probably more skeletons in the closet. Mostly Maggia related. Rigoletto, not Manfredi, which, thank fuck. She’s had enough of Manfredis to last a lifetime.

(There’s one box she didn’t erase, one thing she hasn’t swiped off the map yet, tucked into the lower right-hand corner and labeled _VM._ There are only a few little marks in it. _Silvia Vanessa. The mutant armadillo_ for Fisk _. Boston?_ It’s not something she can erase, and it probably won’t be for a long time yet, Vanessa Marianna heaving herself into a helicopter, painted in chiaroscuro behind her eyes.) 

Willie Lincoln and Rigoletto, Fisk’s predecessor in the loan sharky bits of the underworld. _Why the hell would they pull someone all the way out from Montana when there are dozens or hundreds of guys in the city who would be more than willing to wipe Maggia rivals off the map? Why pick this one guy and call him in and pay for it when you can have six or eight or twenty filing up the hall?_ Something Willie Lincoln could do, maybe. Something he’d done. Some debt he owed some guy in the Maggia that kept pulling him out to the city even when it would have been far more convenient to have someone else do the work instead. She writes out _ability?_ and bounces again, back to Frank’s column and the part that _she_ gets to deal with. The Dogs of Hell ( _the Romans_ ), the Brannigans ( _the Sidhe_ ) and Los Milagros ( _Basta,_ for the _Inkheart_ character, not the insult), Finn Brannigan is still out on the streets, and as long as Finn Brannigan is alive, Frank Castle will keep fighting. _Fuckboy_. Darcy circles it in black. Fuckboy and Lava Girl. These two, Finn Brannigan and Miss Ninja, whoever she is—these two are her priority. _The longer Finn Brannigan is loose, the more bodies will drop._ Innocent people are dead, because of the Irish, because of Brannigan. Not just Frank’s family, not just Elizabeth and Lisa and Frank Jr., bloody April mornings, but others—the bartenders they’d maimed, the pawnshop owners they’d killed, anyone caught in the crossfire during their hunt for Frank, and anyone who’d been nervy enough to get in their way when they’d been at the height of their power. _Finn Brannigan._ Find Finn Brannigan, find Miss Ninja, deal with them both, get them off the street.

 _If Miss Ninja’s working with Brannigan, then I use one to find the other._ Brannigan had been shot, had been decimated thanks to Frank Castle; he’s probably holed up somewhere licking his wounds and figuring out his next move. The Irish, though, they should still be wandering around. Track the Irish, track Finn Brannigan, find Miss Ninja, put them all away. And then, maybe, just maybe, the candle that they’re burning can be left alone for a while. Maybe they can start rebuilding, seriously rebuilding. Maybe Matt can start going over all the things he’s never looked at and sorting them out, maybe she’ll be able to start trusting him again—because she does trust him, at least when it comes to what he says about Elektra, but for the rest of it, it’s up in the air—and maybe it’ll go back to the way it was. Or not the way it was, that’s impossible, but—but it’ll get easier, and she can stop dwelling on it, and stop getting weird flashes of what Kate had said about Elena, and her and Matt getting married.

Darcy caps off her marker. Marriage, Jesus. That is not a thing that she can begin to allow herself to think about _. Why, Elena. Why._ She gets that it’s a thing, for Elena, that she likes matchmaking and likes being Emma Woodhouse and all the rest of it, but just— _why?_ It’s not like Darcy’s ever been the one that people pointed to and said, _her, she’s gonna be married someday._ She’s not marriage material, never has been; she thinks it’s outdated and heteronormative, that it’s overly expensive and overblown and generally impossible to manage or to tolerate. Just—it’s not for her. It’s _not_ for her, and she thought that was like…eminently obvious to anyone who spent more than five minutes in her presence. Not to mention that Elena is seriously jumping the gun with a lot of things considering that she and Matt have only been dating since like…November of last year. For God’s sake, they haven’t talked about anything like that _at all._ Not even close. Not once. Because sure, they live together and basically do everything together, and she doesn’t see herself breaking up with him anytime soon, or vice versa, in spite of all his bullshit, and there are all those things Matt has said about like…not wanting to ruin things or taint things or lose this, which are always nice to hear, but like—marriage is a thing. Marriage is a capital letter Thing, that people with different lives and different ideals do, that’s normal and also insanely, wildly strange. Not the idea of like…tying yourself to someone for the rest of your life, because _that_ makes sense to her, but just the image of it in society, what it means as an ideal. The word is really intimidating, let’s be real. Throwing in the fact that they’re barely just out of Enormous Fight Iceberg Zone in addition to Elektra and also risking death and dismemberment on a nightly basis, it’s just not a feasible thing for her to be thinking about, at the moment, so it needs to _get out of her head—_

Christ. This is that thing that she does. This is the thing that she did with the fake-and-then-really-not-fake kiss in the alleyway, after leaving Metro-General. Think about the easiest problem, because the others are too hard. Somehow, invariably, the easy problems (and easy is a misnomer because this is by no means _easy_ ) always wind up being relationship questions, and then she works herself into a frenzy, and then she has a meltdown. It’s all incredibly messy for everyone involved and she is _not_ going to do it this time. Especially not after the complete and total emotional overload that has been the past week. She shakes her head a few times, turns to the third column, and scrawls _ASANO_ across the top. The rest of it is blank. After all, there’s not much they can do until Elektra slinks back out of the dark.

The break is winding down to a close (not that she knows that, at the time) when Darcy finds herself wandering to St. Patrick’s. She’d wanted to go to Jen’s—God, she wants to talk to Jen, so damn badly, because the last time they’d spoken it’d been a fight and she can’t say sorry and she can’t back down but she misses her sister, damn it—but Jen’s been at the courthouse, helping prep the case against Frank Castle. Going to Elena’s would mean hearing about the marriage thing (which may, possibly, make her skin go as cold and as goosebump-y as if someone’s signed her up for an ice bucket challenge, thinking about it) and she could talk to Karen, but talking to Karen lately inevitably spirals into talking about Frank Castle. She doesn’t mind it most days, but just—she needs to not be stuck thinking about Frank Castle or about Elektra Natchios for five fucking minutes.

It’s a Thursday, which means when she slips in through the front doors (and there’s the holy water tainted with Jew, again, _sorry, Father P_ ) the halls are empty. So is the room where they have their D&D meet-ups, and the back office where Father P usually works on accounts or something. It’s only once she peeks out into the side yard that she tracks him down, collared and in short sleeves and staring at the back of a heavy pew like it holds the keys to the universe. When she knocks on the frame, Father P blinks at her. “Darcy.”

“Heyo.” It’s terrifyingly sunny, today. The world’s too bright for her. “Whatcha doing?”

“Broken pews don’t fix themselves.” He dusts his hands. “There was an accident with one of the parishioners. Put a hole in the back of this one. Did some carpentry work while I was in Africa, managed to get it fixed, but it needed to be sanded down and then restained before church tomorrow.”

“And you dragged it outside on your own?”

“No, I had help.” He frowns at her. “You look exhausted.”

“I’ve been better. But I’ve had more sleep in the past week than I know what to do with, so it’s weird, you know. Going to bed before four in the morning.” She crosses her arms over her chest, and leans against the door of the church. “Sorry to drop by without, you know, prior warning. Should’ve called or something instead of like…appearing out of the blue.”

“It’s fine.” Father P glances at his watch. “It’s the middle of the day, though, shouldn’t you be at work?”

“Long lunch.” And she’d arranged a meeting with one of the MSM clients at a café by the Midtown North precinct, but they’d canceled, so whatever. “Seriously, I can go if you want.”

“No, I’m glad you’re here.” He looks down at the pew again, frowns. “Didn’t expect to see you again for a while, not after the hospital.”

Darcy fiddles with the hem of her button down. It’s easier than looking at him. She crouches, circling the repair on the pew with the tips of her fingers. He’s sanded it smooth, to the point that without the fresh stainer nobody would have been able to tell it _was_ repaired. “Surprise, surprise,” she says. “You sure you don’t want me to go?”

“Pretty sure. Nice to have company.” He shrugs. “Tandy and Ty haven’t been by in a week, and it gets echoey in here without someone else. I caught myself laughing at one of my own jokes the other day, and realized I’d been talking aloud for a good two hours without noticing. It was a little sad.”

“I laugh at my own jokes all the time. Because I’m hilarious.” She rubs her fingers together, wondering if they’re stained, now. “You need help moving it back into place?”

“In a bit. I need a break.” Father P throws the paintbrush back into the bucket of wood stainer. “I have iced tea, if you want it.”

“Can there be coffee instead?”

“You keep drinking it at this rate, and you’re going to have yellow teeth. Or heart failure.”

“Wanna make a bet about which one comes first?” Darcy cocks an eyebrow. “Pretty sure I’ll win.”

“That’s more depressing than funny, you know,” Father P says, but his lips are twitching. “If you haven’t eaten there’s a café down the street with sweet tea. It’s been a while since I last visited my sister in Louisiana, but it comes pretty close to what I remember her having in the fridge.”

All at once the longing’s so strong she could scream. Darcy whines high between her teeth, trying not to think of how the air feels like Georgia, too, heavy and sticky on the back of her neck. “Not fair. You’re using my blood against me.”

“Am I?”

“My darlin’ Father P, you are killin’ me.”

Unlike everyone else she knows who doesn’t pull on a mask—physical, she thinks, or metaphorical—he doesn’t flinch at Lilith. He smiles, instead. “Come on.”

It’s not real sweet tea, not exactly, but it’s close e-damn-nough to make her heart hurt. Syrupy and cool. The waitress gives her a bright purple straw ( _new message to Katie-Kate: look at this motherfucking straw, it you_ ) and she’s completely cool with looking like a happy tween, sitting there with her straw and her sweet tea and Father P settled opposite her at the table, adding iced tea to his lemonade to make an Arnold Palmer. The café specializes more in sandwiches than anything else, but there are hash browns, too, and just…yes. _Happy cat mode, activated._

“Last time we talked you didn’t seem very…” he gropes for a word. “Settled. Are you doing better?”

“Hah.”

“It’s not particularly encouraging when you do that.”

Darcy flops back into her chair, and fiddles with the straw. The fan in the corner of the café has ribbons attached to the cage, and they’re making tiny snapping sounds as the blades whirl, like pops of static. “I mean, I’m not as bad as I was. Time’s helped.”

“Still don’t want to talk about it?”

Another flop. “Not a lot left to say.”

“You might feel better if you go see him,” says Father P. “Elliot.”

“Seeing Elliot Grote will do absolutely nothing good for me or my mood.” Darcy stabs at an ice cube with the straw ( _new message from Katie-Kate: fuck you and the horse you rode in on_ ). “In fact, pretty sure it’d just make things worse.”

“Sometimes things have to get worse before they can get better.”

“Thanks for the koan, but if things get any worse I’m probably going to crawl into a subway tunnel and not come back out again.” When she crosses her ankles, the cut across her ribcage tugs uncomfortably. “Way too much going on in my life to add in going to see a comatose murderer.”

“Well, at the risk of another koan, generally I’ve found that as people we’re never given more than we can handle. Even if it sometimes seems that way. It generally depends on how willing you are to ask for help, is all.”

“And I can ask for help, believe me. I’ve been asking for help. If I hadn’t, things might have turned out a lot worse.” Poison ivy up her throat, clawing out her mouth. “Just—there are a lot of things I haven’t looked at, in a long time, and everything this past week—I dunno. Dragged them back to the fore.”

“And I’m assuming you don’t want to talk about those.”

“I told you, both me and Matt need so much more therapy than we’re getting, you have no idea.”

“Ah.” Father P cracks his neck, unhappily. “I shouldn’t have been on my knees for so long.”

“That’s what she said,” says Darcy, and endures the look of extremely benevolent tolerance that _that_ little masterpiece inspires. “C’mon, Father, it was like…right there.”

“You’re talking to a man of the cloth, Darcy.”

“Yeah, and according to some readings, Jesus married a prostitute. Plus, I mean, the guy was a carpenter, I doubt I can say anything at all that he hadn’t heard while he was alive.”

Father P rolls his eyes, and adds more iced tea to the Arnold Palmer. “Sometimes I amuse myself by imagining the archbishop of my diocese meeting you. You’d give him heartburn. Or apoplexy.”

“I’m cute and sassy, I tend to have that effect on people.” There are clouds painted on the ceiling. This place is both tiny and adorable. Behind the counter, the waitress—a desi woman with a strong Louisiana accent, even in Hindi—laughs at something she hears on the telephone, and props her elbow on the counter. “You know how I feel about stuff like that, though, Father P. We just have stuff to deal with, and it doesn’t matter whether or not we can handle it. Problems crop up. There’s no like…divine inspiration for it.”

“Has something else happened, then?”

She can’t help it. Her mouth quirks. “You trying to get me into confession again?”

“I classify all our discussions as confession. Makes it simpler if the police ever come knocking.”

Darcy grimaces again. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I like knowing what’s happening. Helps me sleep at night.” In the kitchen, someone rings a bell, and the woman from Louisiana puts the phone down to go collect plates. “I might be stretching a few rules, but it holds. I’m not too fussed.”

“Still.”

“If it’s not Elliot,” he says, “then what’s bothering you?”

Darcy presses her tongue to the roof of her mouth. It doesn’t take any of the pressure off, not out of her head or out of her throat, but she feels better doing it, at least. She swallows. “I mean—I’m juggling a million knives at once and every second I feel like I’m going to drop one and have it slit my wrist. Everything that’s been in the news, and then something else I’m working on, a murder investigation, I mean—it’s stalling, it’s fifteen years old, but it keeps bugging me. And then other stuff.”

“Other stuff?”

She rubs at her eyes. “You’re going to think it’s really stupid,” she says. “And shallow.”

“Darcy, the most significant conversation I’ve had with a parishioner this week was about tulip bulbs. Pretty sure you’re not going to drop down into gardening tactics.”

Darcy snorts. The waitress—her nametag says Kala, and all Darcy can think for a second is Kala Dandekar, and God, and marigolds at a temple for Ganesha—slides their sandwiches onto the table, and goes back to her conversation in Hindi. “I mean, on a scale of one to _Sweet Valley High_ , this is pretty _10 Things I Hate About You._ ”

“I don’t know what that means,” says Father P, plaintively. “Am I supposed to know what that means?”

“It means sappy teen romances with badass lady protags, is all.” There isn’t enough oil and vinegar on her sandwich. She fumbles the dispenser out of the basket at the end of the table. “I dunno if you’ve talked to Matt, and I know, you know, you can’t tell me if you did, but just—we had a fight, recently. It’s kind of hard to be normal after you fight.”

Father P blinks. He blinks again, and then looks down at his roast beef sandwich.

“I told you it was shallow.”

“It actually explains a few things,” he says. “And it’s not shallow. It might not be a life or death issue, but that doesn’t make it shallow.”

She’s torn. There are french fries on her plate, and they’re just the right temperature, but there’s also a sandwich. _Priorities._ “Why do I feel shallow, then?”

“Societal impulses that designate anything to do with romantic relationships or feelings as the overarching drive of life but simultaneously denigrating those who are deeply affected by them and the issues that come with them as weak or negatively feminine?”

She nearly chokes on her french fry. Darcy gags, and gulps at her sweet tea. “Jesus, Father—”

“Language.” 

“—was that from your psych degree or was that pure social justice warrior that came out of your mouth just now?”

“Tandy links me internet articles she thinks I should see. It’s been helping a lot of discussion with the younger people in the neighborhood, actually. They’re more willing to talk to me if I know what they’re talking about.”

“Holy shit.” And _that_ , of course, doesn’t get a reprimand. She looks at her sandwich again, and goes back to the fries. “You are actually the best priest on the planet, I swear.”

Father P turns pink. “Well, thank you.”

“You’re very welcome.” She adds vinegar to the fries, too, because she can. “It’s just stupid. I can talk to anyone about it, I know that, just—I don’t want to bother Foggy, because he has so much on his plate with work, and I can’t with Matt because I don’t want to beat a dead horse, Kate’s back at school full time and lives on the other side of town, and Karen’s just—Karen’s working on something that’s taking up a lot of her time and energy so I don’t want to bother her, either. I’ve already thrown enough of this fight in their faces, and it shouldn’t—you know, we came to a point of understanding about it, so it shouldn’t still be worrying me.”

“What about your sister?”

 _Right to the heart._ “Um, we—argued. And she’s really busy, so I just—I haven’t heard from her lately. I’m—I’m kind of worried, actually, but that’s…not the point.”

“Ah.”

Darcy plays with her sandwich for a while. The desi woman laughs again, and twirls the cord of the old fashioned phone around her finger. In the back, someone’s playing the _O Brother Where Art Thou_ soundtrack, and _I Am A Man of Constant Sorrow_ is really not the tune she needs in her head right now.

“Is it the fight that’s bothering you?”

“I mean, just—” _Why are words so fucking complicated?_ “He promised me he wouldn’t do it again, and like—I’m pretty sure I scared the shit out of him, with some of the things I said, and I think, maybe, I can trust him not to, even if it’s hard, but the situation right now with Elektra—”

“Elektra?”

“Has he not mentioned Elektra?”

Father P shakes his head. “I haven’t seen him in almost two weeks.”

 _Ah, shit._ Darcy swallows a few times. “Um, Elektra’s Matt’s—well, I mean. Ex-girlfriend. From law school. She’s, you know, back. And she wants our help with something.”

“Legally?”

“Not exactly, no.”

“And you’re helping her?”

“I mean, we can’t not.”

She has the distinct feeling Father P wants to put his face in his hands. “Oh.”

“Yeah,” Darcy says. “Oh.”

“Is that what you’re worried about?” He folds his hands on the table. “That something will happen with the pair of them?”

“Not—exactly.” Darcy flexes her hands in and out of fists (the bandages are off her right hand, and even if it’s kind of scabby and messy, it at least doesn’t hurt to punch someone anymore) and goes back to the vinegar and the fries. “Maybe, you know, if me and Matt were—weren’t as settled as we were, if we hadn’t had nearly a year behind us at this point, maybe I’d have more cause to be, but like—I don’t know. Their breakup was really bad, and there are some other things that I probably shouldn’t tell you, to be honest, because that’s Matt’s business, but just—it makes things complicated.”

“Other things meaning illegal things?”

“Other things meaning like…feelings things, I dunno.” How the hell to explain polyromanticism to a priest? Should she, even? That would be outing Matt, and that’s such a vile thought that it makes her stomach churn. No, the polyromantic thing, that’s Matt’s business. She switches tacks. “Matt has his thing about—I dunno. Being in control of himself. Being precise, being—I was wrong, back then, when I said he was chaotic neutral, it’s a chaotic good thing. Matt’s chaotic good. And me, I’m—I dunno. I try to be chaotic good. I’m closer to the edge than Matt is, I think.”

“The edge of what?”

“Not being good,” she says, and Father P’s eyebrows magnet together. “Not—not holding back, not being good, not…not looking for justice. Closer to the edge.”

Father P picks at the crust of his sandwich. “And is that what happened to Elliot?”

“Elliot Grote murdered four people because they happened to see his face. Two of them were teenagers. I stand by that.” She lets out a breath. “That’s not the point. Matt’s chaotic good, I’m chaotic good. If anyone’s chaotic neutral, it’s Elektra, and being around her, it’s—the last time Elektra and Matt were in the same orbit, it wasn’t good for anyone. Least of all Matt.”

“Is she a bad influence?”

“That’s not how I would word it.”

“Then how would you word it?”

“Just—” Darcy pushes at her plate. “Their relationship was a train wreck. Not that she made him do anything or—or led him anywhere or forced him into any of it, because you know Matt, you really think he’d be forced into anything?”

“Is that a serious question?”

“Exactly.” She points with her fry. “Elektra didn’t _make_ Matt do anything, but it was still—it was toxic, in a lot of ways, and he’s never let himself think about it, I don’t think, and now that she’s back he’s freaked out and I have to, you know. I have to make sure I’m there, I have to help, I _want_ to help, it’s not that I don’t want to help or that I’m uncomfortable with it or anything like that. Though it’s seriously uncomfortable seeing her.”

“For him or for you?”

“Both of us,” she says. “For different reasons.”

The bell above the door chimes. It’s a woman, alone, in skinny jeans and chucks, sunglasses perched on her nose. For a second, out of the corner of her eye, Darcy thinks it’s Kate—the hair’s dark—but when she turns and looks, no. Kala behind the counter greets the woman in Hindi, and hangs up the phone.

“If you’re not worried that something will happen with the pair of them, then what are you worried about?”

( _Bang,_ and Matt falls, and Frank’s arm around her throat, _me or her, Red_ —)

“Losing him,” Darcy says. “I don’t—not to Elektra, exactly. But Matt’s scared of losing himself, because the last time she was here he came—he came really close to doing something he would have loathed himself for, and all that’s coming back up, and the past week has been really—really terrible, and I just—” Fucking hell. Teary eyes. She dabs at her face with the napkin. “I told you it was stupid and shallow.”

“Really isn’t.” Father P shakes his head. “It seems natural, to me.”

“And I can’t tell him,” Darcy says, barely listening. It’s like something inside her’s broken, and now that she’s said it aloud, she can’t stop talking. “Just—I mean, I can, I know I can, but not right away, not so soon after—after we had that argument and everything else that’s going on, I can’t say to him, y’know, _I don’t want to lose you_ , because he’ll take that as _I don’t want to lose you to her_ and that isn’t—that really isn’t what this is, Father P, I’m not scared of Elektra, and I don’t think he’ll get it, it’s why I haven’t—he’ll just think that I’m worried because, you know, ex-girlfriend out of nowhere, but that doesn’t have anything to do with it. I’m just—I’ve already nearly lost him once, with—with everything, and I can’t—”

“Darcy,” Father P says, “slow down.”

“I can’t lose him, Father,” Darcy says. She shakes her head. “I can’t—I know that’s not supposed to be how love works, you’re supposed to be able to let people go if it means they’d be happy, but I can’t, I really—really can’t, and I saw him—he nearly died, and I can’t lose him again, not—not to himself, not to anyone, not like that, I can’t—”

“Darcy,” he says again, but she can’t really see, anymore. She presses the napkin into her eyes, pushing her glasses up her forehead and trying to breathe, in through her nose, out through her mouth. The two desi women either haven’t noticed she’s on the verge of tears, or they’re talking about her in Hindi, and either way it’s something to anchor herself to. Darcy wipes her face.

“That was, um. I didn’t mean to do that in public, sorry.”

“You haven’t told anyone about this, have you?” Father P says. “Not any of it.”

“I mean, no.” Her nose is plugged, all of a sudden. The vinegar on her sandwich makes her eyes burn. “Like I said, they’re all busy. Even Claire, she’s—she’s had double-shifts at the ER and it’s already kind of awkward talking about Matt with her even though I know, y’know, we’re good on that front. Just—it’s ridiculous. Everything’s so tangled and confusing.”

“You need to talk to him,” Father P says, in a soft voice. “You can’t bottle up something like this, Darcy. Worrying about it isn’t—it’s not ridiculous.”

“What do I say to him, though? _I know you’d never cheat on me but I’m really scared of losing you to yourself because I know how fucking stubborn you can be_? I just—” She can see her reflection in the window, and Christ, she’s a wreck. Her eyes are puffy and her nose is red and even with the cut healing nicely, it’s going to leave a bit of a scar. _More souvenirs._ “I can’t talk to him about this right now, Father P, not—I mean, I can, but we’re already so fragile it could be a huge problem. And I know how hypocritical that is for me to say, when I’m always the one being like _talk about it, we need to talk about it,_ but it’s not the right time. It isn’t. He’s asked me to be there, to help him, to—to stand in the way of him falling into the dark. He’s as scared of losing himself as I am of losing him, and me being in the middle, that’s something I can do. And maybe in a few weeks when we’re not standing on eggshells I can say it aloud, you know, _I’m scared to death I’m going to lose you_ , but not until then. I can wait.”

“Letting it fester won’t do much good for either of you.” Father P wipes his thumb over the sweaty glass of the Arnold Palmer, stares at the dampness on his skin like it’s a surprise. “Especially in the face of everything else.”

“I mean, I’m always scared of losing him, I can’t not be with what we do. Just—the past week gave me a taste of it, y’know, what’d be like to—” _to have him ripped out of me,_ she almost says. “I don’t think I can be without him. And this week made me realize it in a way that—that I couldn’t understand, before. This is just, you know. This isn’t _I can’t lose you to a bullet_ , this is _I can’t lose you to yourself_ , and with how messed up he already is because of this that’s not something I can say without making everything about the situation worse. I need to be the unflappable one right now, I need—everyone needs me to be the rock, at the moment. So I’m being the rock.” 

“Does everyone need you to be the rock?” Father P says. “Or do you need you to be the rock?”

Darcy shrugs. “Can’t it be both?”

“I suppose.”

“You think I’m doing the wrong thing,” Darcy says, and finally picks up her sandwich. “Waiting on this.”

“I think you’re prioritizing other people’s comfort over your own worry, and that it’s not healthy for you.”

Her mouth twitches. “You really have been reading articles about feminism, haven’t you?”

“Yes, but that part’s just common sense.”

“I’ll talk to him.” She licks vinegar off her fingers, and curls her toes at the sting. “When I’m sure I won’t, you know, break his brain. I’ll talk to him. Plus I’m still pissed that we fought in the first place, because he pulled some stupid shit, and I really, really don’t like fighting with him. I’m actually like…phenomenally bad at it. Before everything went down last year, the last time we actually, you know, argued like that was…well. I don’t think we argued like that ever, until last year. We’d get into little spats, especially when he and Elektra were dating, and we’d snap at each other, but like—not fights, not like that. We’re both really, really bad at it. So I think—I think _I’m_ too raw, still, to have another soul-baring conversation moment. Has to do with both of us, not just him.”  

“That at least I can understand.”

Father P falls quiet after that. Darcy hones in on her sandwich. Her eyes sting, and people will ask if she’s been crying, and won’t _that_ be fun. The two women at the counter are watching her, but when she looks around, they avert their eyes like they’ve been caught peeping. It’s only once she’s finished her sandwich that Father P clears his throat.

“I know you don’t want to, Darcy, but it might—it might help to talk to someone about it. Not Matthew, but someone. Other than me. You can always talk to me, and I’ll always listen, but it might help you to go over it with someone close to the situation, as well as someone far away. And I think they’d be grateful you told them, even if they seem to want you to—” his nose wrinkles. “To _be the rock_ , like you said. I think it might be positive.”

“More positive than punching Elektra in the face?” Darcy drains her sweet tea. “Because the only reason I haven’t done that is because I’m trying to be the mature one.”

“More positive than punching Elektra in the face, yes.”

“Well, that’s boring.” No, she’s not actually going to punch Elektra in the face. She’s pissed, but she’s not going to punch Elektra in the face, and after Frank Castle she’s not going to throw all the blame on Elektra either. She just…well. She kind of wants to punch Elektra in the face, still. “I’ll talk to Foggy in a few days, once I’m sure I won’t, y’know. Cry all over him.”

Father P leaves the crust of his sandwich on the plate. “Of course.”

“I never said thank you.” Darcy clears her throat. “For the flower. I know I kind of…I think I disappointed you, the last time we talked. About—stuff.”

Father P blinks at her again. He shakes his head. “You didn’t disappoint me, Darcy. I was sad, is all, that—that there are parts of people you can’t believe in, anymore. But you didn’t disappoint me.”

Her throat can stop pinching, now. “Thank you for the flower, anyway.”

“Of course.” He wipes his fingers on his napkin. “You should probably head back to work. It’ll take a while, walking.”

“Yeah.” Darcy drags another paper napkin out of the dispenser, and blows her nose. “I should—I need to wash my face.”

The bathroom’s cramped, a one-person dealio, and by the time she’s maneuvered around to press cold water to her eyes and fix her makeup afterwards (it doesn’t take more than a few minutes, she’s practiced at this by now—the makeup fixing, not the crying-and-then-makeup-fixing) Father P’s already paid for the sandwiches. “Don’t,” he says, when she goes to get her wallet. “It’s fine, honestly.”

“I spent the whole lunch whining at you and crying, that’s not—”

“The world’s not going to end if I pay for a sandwich,” he says, and opens the door to the café. “It would if I chipped in for a taxi, but not if I pay for a sandwich.”

Darcy laughs. “Duly noted. You sure you don’t want me to help you drag that pew back in?”

“I think I can manage. There are a few kids who skip school on Thursdays that I can rope into helping me.”

“Father P,” she says, as he turns away. Darcy shifts her purse on her shoulder, biting her lip. Then she hugs him, very quickly. It’s too abrupt to actually call it a hug. More like she crashes, and then yanks away again before she burns him. When she pulls back, he’s blinking a lot. “Thank you.”

She darts off before he can say anything. It might be weird to hug a priest, who knows. The women in the café are watching her through the window, anyway. She waggles her fingers at them, and keeps moving. There’s more nothing she has to find on the Willie Lincoln case, anyway.

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The next day is Friday, and when she comes in, it’s to find Roth from the DA’s office winding Karen up into an absolute tower of a temper. “Bullshit,” she says, as soon as they’ve scared the guy out the door. “All of that was bullshit, probably handcrafted by Reyes, it was _bullshit_ , Darcy, you were there—”

Darcy, who’d been given a statement of her own to reject, says, “I mean, obviously it was bullshit.”

“It was _bullshit_ ,” Karen says again through her teeth, and stomps off to smack Satan’s Photocopier into doing things. It’s her usual tactic, when she’s in a mood and can’t leave work. Rey lifts her head from the floor and watches her for a minute or two before letting out a huge, doggy sigh, and shutting her eyes again. “It was absolute fucking bullshit—”

“Door’s open,” Matt says, in a mild voice. “He can probably still hear you.”

“I don’t fucking care!”

“Karen, I say this in a way that is absolutely not meant to patronize, but take a deep breath, okay? Getting pissed about Reyes being a fuckwit isn’t actually going to do much other than break the already broken photocopier.”

Karen still slams the lid down again, and taps the toe of her shoe against the leg of the machine. “ _I believe in protecting women_ —fucking sexist little prick-ass shitbird—”

“And shutting the door,” Foggy says, yanking it closed. “Karen, I get that you’re looking into this, but maybe calling the admittedly extraordinarily wet-behind-the-ears attorney from the DA’s office a _fucking sexist little prick-ass shitbird_ isn’t necessarily the best idea.”

“It’s what he _is_.”

“Karen, I’m pretty sure you could break that guy’s wrist by looking at him wrong, he’s the one that needs protecting from you, not the other way around.” She thinks, for a beat, she might have misspoken—telling Karen people need protecting from her isn’t always the best idea—but Karen looks more icily pleased than anything. The tightness fades from her chest. “It’s Reyes that we should be angry at, not Roth. Though he is a fucking sexist little prick-ass shitbird.”

“ _Thank_ you,” says Karen.

“I’m not saying he wasn’t sexist, just—never mind.” Foggy rubs at his face again. He’s been doing that more and more lately, and she kind of wants to hug him. She’s not sure he’ll appreciate it, right now, but she wants to. “Roth’s right about one thing, though. Case is open and shut. And if they _do_ extradite him, it won’t take very long before whatever judge gets assigned to the case passes the death penalty and Castle’s, you know.” He pinches the air with his fingers, and yanks. “ _Ffft_.”

 _Not running anywhere, I don’t think_. Goosebumps prickle down her arms.

“Not if we do something.” Karen balls her hands up. “We can’t just let them kill him, Foggy, we can’t let the justice system do this, give him a shitty public defender and let him _die_ , that’s not what we do—”

“He shot at you, Karen, Jesus.” Foggy flaps a hand at Matt and Darcy. “ _And_ at them, you saw how fucking wrecked we all were! You actually want to help this guy after that?”

“But we don’t know what happened!” She shakes her head. “What he was doing, Foggy, he was—his family died, right in front of him, he was going after the people who did it, he didn’t—he didn’t shoot me and he could have and he didn’t kill Darcy or Matt and he could have and there’s something _here_ , Foggy, something Reyes is trying to hide—”

“—and if we keep pushing at Reyes like this, _we’re_ dead in the water!”

Darcy glances at Matt, and mouths, _Not good._

“I _know that_.” Rey heaves herself up off the floor, comes to press into Karen’s leg. Karen doesn’t seem to notice. “I know that it could screw us, Foggy, believe me, but if we just let her steamroll everyone all over again then we’re never going to find out what really happened—”

“You’ve been looking for two weeks, you and Ben haven’t found anything!”

“Because we haven’t been looking in the right place!”

“This guy is a psycho murderer, Karen, he doesn’t deserve—”

“Karen,” says Matt. “Foggy, hold up—”

“He is _not_ psycho,” Karen says, in a shaking voice. “I don’t know what the hell he is but he is _not psycho,_ Foggy—”

“Karen,” Darcy says.

“Sorry for getting defensive when you start talking like you actually want to save this guy when all he’s ever done is aim a gun at our heads—”

“Don’t fucking start, Foggy—”

“ _Karen_ ,” Darcy snaps, and Karen shuts up. Foggy does too, mostly because he’s had his say and he’s not going to push any further. “Come on. We’re going on a walk.”

Karen blinks. “What?”

“Walk, you, me. Rey,” she adds, and Rey blinks slowly. “Come on. This is a thing that’s happening.” She looks at Matt, then at Foggy. “You two stay here.”

Foggy blows his hair out of his eyes. “You’re for this too, aren’t you? You want to help the psycho murderer with the shotgun fetish.”

“He’s _not psycho_ ,” Karen says, but Darcy fists her hand around Karen’s wrist and she goes quiet again.

“I think Karen’s right and the whole situation’s a lot more complicated than we know.” Darcy bites her lip. “And considering every time I’ve met with Frank Castle one of us has tried to throw the other off a rooftop or whatever, I don’t think I’m the best person to answer that question.”

“But you want to defend him.”

“I think he needs to be heard. But that’s not the point.” She snaps to Karen. “You, come. You, stay.”

“I’m not a dog,” Foggy says, but she’s already yanked Karen out the door and shut it behind them.

There’s a shaved ice stand seven blocks away from the firm. Not that she thinks Matt will eavesdrop, but she’s pretty sure Karen won’t talk if they’re within range, so she drags Karen (and Rey) all the way down the street to the shaved ice guy (his name’s Miguel, from the Dominican Republic, and she’s actually never met a cuter dad than Miguel—every time she goes to talk to him he has more photos of his husband and his baby girls and it’s actually fucking adorable) and then even further, to a tiny park with graffiti on the back of the jungle gym. Karen’s fallen into fuming silence, glaring at her cup of shaved ice like she wants to melt it. It’s only once she’s plopped down onto the only shady bench, and tugged Karen down too, that she says, “I know you have a vested interest in this, but yelling at Foggy isn’t going to help anyone with anything.”

“Vested interest?” Karen pins her to the bench with ice eyes. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Darcy doesn’t say anything. She just stares. Stares and stares and stares, until Karen wilts a little, and looks back at her shaved ice. She stabs at the mango side with her plastic spoon, leaves the other to melt. Her lips have thinned out to spider-webs.

“It doesn’t help anyone,” Darcy says. “They don’t know.”

“You didn’t tell Matt?”

“Of course I didn’t tell Matt.” This is actually the first time she’s mentioned it aloud since Elena’s party, last year. “I don’t know if he’s figured it out or not, he’s never said anything, but no. I’ve never told Matt. Or Foggy.”

Karen swallows hard. She stabs the ice with her spoon again. “Oh.”

Rey sits on Darcy’s foot. Her claws are actually weirdly painful, considering how blunt they are. She grits her teeth, and pets Rey’s head anyway. “You asked me not to, Karen, and I didn’t. I haven’t said a word. Not to anyone, okay?”

“I know.”

“Foggy just—” She sighs. “Foggy’s worried about all of us.”

“I know.”

“I think we’re all kind of worried about you, with how focused you are on this.”

“I know.”

“And he doesn’t get—when Foggy hears about Frank Castle, even with everything that happened to him, all he can think is _guy who chained my best friend to a rooftop_ and _guy who made my other best friend nearly lose her mind_ and _guy who shot at my third best friend even if he didn’t mean to hit her_ —”

Karen blinks. “You think Foggy thinks I’m one of his best friends?”

“Of course he does. We’re a team, the five of us. Of course that’s what he thinks, Kare.” _I’m also pretty sure he still has a crush on you, but that is not something I’m touching with a ten foot pole._ “And with everything that’s happening with the firm, it just—he’s worrying. He’s a worrywart. And he’s not—”  

 _—like us._ Not dark like them, not vicious like them. Foggy can be angry, Foggy can be bitter, Foggy can be vindictive, but Foggy is also sunshine. Foggy’s the heart, not the spine or the fists or the head or the teeth. Foggy’s their heart, the moral compass. Foggy isn’t like them. He’s never been dragged backwards into the dark.

Karen turns her cup in her hands. When a bit of the syrup dribbles onto her thumb, she licks it away. “You want to help him,” she says. “Don’t you?”

“Foggy?”

She shakes her head. “Castle.”

Darcy breathes so deep it hurts, and lets it out again. “I don’t know how I feel about Frank Castle. I know that a few weeks ago I—I nearly did something that I would probably have regretted. And I know that I’m still—I’m still kind of fucked up, from that. And from some of the things he said to me.” _From how easily he saw right through me._ “I know that he wasn’t trying to kill us, but he killed a lot of people, and in some way I have some responsibility for that. Not just for not stopping him, but for—for providing a stage, almost. Not that he wouldn’t have done it even if me and Matt aren’t what we are, but we—you’re right, when you said we opened a door with this. It made things easier.”

Karen’s lips part. Her eyes go big. All the blood leaves her face. “I didn’t mean—”

“I know you weren’t blaming us, Kare, and I think I’ve convinced Matt. You know how he is.”

She wrinkles her nose. “I don’t know how you convince him of anything, honestly.”

“You and Foggy should compare notes on that one, it’s not like I have any idea.” Darcy rubs at the tip of her nose. “You weren’t blaming us, I know that, but—I don’t know. I don’t know how to feel about Frank Castle. I don’t know that I want to see him dead, anymore, but—but I’m not sure how to feel. I just—I understand him better than Foggy does.”

Karen’s quiet, again. She keeps crushing the ice with the flat of her spoon, not eating, just squashing. It’s going to turn into a sopping mess. Darcy doesn’t have the heart to stop her. “His whole family,” she says, quietly. “The—the house is empty. They never came back. They went out to the park and they never came back. They were killed right in front of him, Darcy.”

“I know.”

“I was lucky.” Her eyes are damp. Rey shifts off of Darcy’s foot again, and does her level best to put her head on Karen’s knee. She’s a bit too short for it, so she mostly just torques her neck weirdly and looks unhappy about it, but she tries. Karen threads Rey’s good ear through her fingers. “I was—what happened with Wesley, I was lucky. And I never thought I’d say that, y’know? That—that what happened was _lucky_. But he was going to—”

She stops.

“You’ve never talked about it.” Darcy looks at her own shaved ice, and realizes that the cherry’s leaking all over her wrist. It’s stained the cuff of her shirt bright scarlet. “What happened.”

“I don’t want to remember it happened.” Karen shuts her eyes. “I don’t—maybe Castle should have shot me in that hallway. Maybe I deserve to be punished for what I did.”

“You do _not_.” Darcy puts her cup aside. “Karen, I told you then, I’m telling you now, you did that to protect us. What you did—it was wrong, but—but you did it out of goodness, you did it to save us—”

“Yeah, and I was lucky enough that it worked.” When Darcy rests her fingertips to the back of Karen’s hand, Karen flinches. “I just—I was lucky to survive, lucky he didn’t kill me, lucky that Fisk never looked at me and—and nobody ever figured it out. And I know, now, that—that you probably could have saved yourselves, or Matt could have done something, but I was so—I was so, so scared he was going to take you guys away, and I wasn’t going to let him touch any of you, not again, not after—not after what happened, and I don’t—”

“Karen—”

“Darcy, I was so—I saved you. Or not you, and not Matt, but—but Wesley was going to come after all of us, and I did what I did to stop it, because I didn’t—I couldn’t watch any of you be hurt, not again. But Darcy, Frank—Frank couldn’t save his family. He couldn’t stop it, they—they died, right in front of him, his wife and his children, all of them, and he was shot in the head, and now Reyes is trying to cover up whatever happened, and that’s not—that’s not _fair_. No matter what he’s done since, that isn’t—it’s not right, that she’s doing that. It’s not fair that he couldn’t protect his family, when I could—”

She hits the brakes, shuts up, closes her eyes even as tears start threading down her cheeks. Rey makes an unhappy noise, and starts to pace back and forth. Darcy digs a handful of napkins out of her bag, and wipes the sticky cherry syrup off her hand before slipping her fingers between Karen’s, holding on. “Look at me,” she says. “Please, Kare.”

Karen shudders. Her eyes are red, when she opens them, but they’re that scary banshee blue again, hurricane blue. Darcy holds tight to her hand.

“We can go see him,” she says. “Castle. I don’t know if they’ll let us in, but—but we can try. If you want.”

She shudders again. Karen clasps Darcy’s fingers so tight she’s almost crushing them, clinging on. “You probably shouldn’t go with me, if he recognized you—”

“Frank doesn’t give a damn who I am outside the mask, he just—he thinks I’m a stopgap in a problem only he can solve, is all. And even if he recognizes me after weeks of drugs and whatever else is going on, nobody would be around to hear him ask. Attorney-client privilege. It’d be you and me, and maybe Foggy and Matt in there, no one who could hurt us.” She looks down at the dog. “Is this why you took Rey?”

“He’s not bad,” Karen says. “I don’t—I don’t know what he is, but he’s not a psycho. He’s not crazy, not like Reyes is saying. He’s not—he can’t be crazy, not like that. If he is, then—”

She bites her tongue. Still. _What does that mean for me?_ And more than that: _What does that mean for any of us?_ Darcy shifts her shaved ice out of Rey’s reach with her free hand. _What does that mean for all of us, if Frank Castle is crazy? What does that make us?_

“There’s no way we can know what Wesley would have done if you hadn’t done what you did,” Darcy says. Karen searches her face, her lips trembling a little. “There’s no way for us to know. But you did save us. If Fisk had had Wesley at the end, we probably wouldn’t have won. One or more of us might be dead. So yeah, you saved us, Karen. Don’t think that you didn’t.”

Karen makes a squashed cat noise, and shuts her eyes again. Darcy pushes a few strands of hair out of Karen’s face, slipping close and putting her arms around her. There’s a shaking in Karen’s ribs that’s almost like adrenalin, and when she leans forward and tangles her hands together behind Darcy’s back she’s basically squashing her entirely. Power death grip. “  

“I don’t—” It tickles against Darcy’s ear. “He couldn’t save his family, Darcy. I saved mine, but he couldn’t save his, and we both—he can’t be crazy.”

And that’s a kick in the chest, holy shit. Darcy pets Karen’s hair. “You don’t need to feel guilty for that.”

“I don’t feel guilty, I just—” She hides in Darcy’s shoulder. “It’s not fair. And he’s not—half the time I don’t think he was doing the wrong thing. He did—he did the wrong thing to you, he hurt you, and he hurt Matt, but the people he killed, I don’t—I don’t know why Matt thinks they didn’t deserve to die for what they did when he—”

She bites it off.

“When he what, Karen?”

Karen’s throat works. She lifts her head, her eyes flicking over Darcy’s face. “Kate told me,” she says. “What—what Matt did. He tried to shoot him, Frank. Because Frank had you.”

_Jesus Christ._

“I haven’t told Foggy,” Karen says very quickly, still holding on with her hands on Darcy’s waist. “I haven’t—I don’t know if we should keep it from him but I haven’t told him, Matt should tell him, but just—he was willing to try and kill Frank for you, why does he still get so—”

“Because Matt still thinks people are good,” Darcy says. “In spite—no matter what they do, he thinks that they all have to have some kind of good. I think it’s a Catholic thing, I’m not sure, but what he did with Frank, he—he did the same thing you did, with Wesley. He was trying to protect me, and—and he was angry and terrified and he decided. But he would have hated himself for it if he’d managed it.”

 _The way you hate yourself,_ she thinks, as Karen’s eyes shadow. Darcy looks at her for a little bit, and then she tips her head up, puts her mouth to Karen’s forehead. Red marks, again, like blood, like bruises, and Karen heaves a shaky breath and rests her head to Darcy’s shoulder and stays there. The snocones are melting onto the bench.

“You’re okay,” Darcy says. “We’ll do what we can, with Frank.”

Karen nods, once.

Her throat works. Darcy wets her lips. “You’re my family too,” she says. “I hope you know that.”

Karen snakes an arm around her waist, and leans there until Darcy’s phone starts to ring.


	10. Idle Hands

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To those of you who guessed right: yes! Miss Ninja is Maya Lopez. To those of you who don't know, Maya is a character from the original Daredevil comics; a deaf Cheyenne woman with the mutant ability to perfectly mimic everything she sees. She was raised by Fisk after her father, a mobster, was murdered. She's definitely deaf in this fic, and all phone conversations she was listed as having previously were actually Skype convos. (There were differences in the precursor: "the phone rings" vs. "she picks up," or something along those lines, and if you'll recall she never speaks on the phone.) She calls herself Echo.
> 
> ...I have been thinking about this for a long damn time. 
> 
> Content warnings: some graphic violence imagery from Brannigan, some allusions to things that happened to Kate, discussion of The Crucifixion/Nobu torturing Darcy.
> 
> Unbeta'd. 
> 
> (Guys, if you have not heard Body and Blood by clipped., PLEASE LISTEN TO IT. clipped. is Daveed Diggs' hip-hop/rap duo (for those of you who know who that is) and BY GOD I LOVE IT.)

“I want that bastard dead,” says Brannigan.

She can’t help it. She rolls her eyes. Brannigan isn’t looking at her; he’s staring at one of his men, Kelly or Michael or Jim or some other Irish name that’s merging with all the other Irish names in her head, staring with his hand pressed to the bloody gauze on his shoulder and his teeth bared like an animal. She’d be frightened of him, if she weren’t certain she could break his neck before he could get up off the bed. Kelly or Michael or Jim looks like he wants to piss himself.

“I want that scummy bastard in here so I can peel his teeth out of his skull,” Brannigan says. “That bloody motherfucking bastard with his little hooded friends and their fucking war, I want them dead.”

“Cops are all over the hospital, sir,” says Kelly or Michael or Jim or Shaun. “Can’t get near without pissin’ ‘em off, and there are reporters fucking everywhere.”

“Like that ever stopped us before.” Brannigan looks at the mug in his hand, and sets it aside, very carefully. His other arm is up in a sling, his shoulder fucked to hell by the shotgun blast at such close range. It’s a miracle, she thinks, that Finn Brannigan still has his face left to him. Fucked knee, fucked shoulder. He’ll limp for the rest of his life, probably need a brace to even get to his feet again. He’s not best pleased. “Used to be we owned that bloody fucking hospital. Used to be the cops and the press and the city knew that they didn’t get in our way if we wanted a man dead in the street. ”

“Fisk—”

“ _Fisk_.” He almost spits. She almost snarls. “Fisk was a bloody disgrace. And all you bastards turning and running like children rather than face the man down and protect what was rightfully ours—”

 _Ours._ She scoffs, rolls her eyes. _You can’t own a city_. A city is its own creation. Men and women are its hands, but a city builds itself. She’d read somewhere that there was a kind of mushroom that grew so densely underground that every root of every mushroom of that breed in a forest was woven together at the root, that the mushrooms would act like the synapses of a brain, releasing bursts of electricity and sending them through the rootlines to new mushrooms erupting on the opposite side of the woods, snaps of communication in the underground. Or code, maybe. Programs in a computer, crafted by human hands but operating independently. Not mushrooms, but code, an electronic system, synapses in a brain that belongs to no one. That, she thinks, is what a city is. On the surface all buildings are individual, and at its core, it’s all woven together into a single mind. Human hands build the towers, but the towers have their own root system, have their own strings of code. Every building linked together by the experiences of the people in and around them. No one building belongs to a single person. No neighborhood and no borough and no city belongs to anyone, and that doesn’t change.

Of course, she’s never voiced this opinion to anyone. Especially not the mushroom metaphor. She doesn’t need more Pocahontas jokes.

“I don’t give a flying fuck about the fat man and his delusions of grandeur,” Brannigan snaps, and then he shuts his eyes. She’s careful to keep herself from moving, keeps her fingers loose at her sides. Brannigan fumbles his jar of pills open, pops a few. When he speaks again, he could be at a garden party, his face smooth and sculpted as glass. “I don’t care about Fisk, or what he did to our neighborhood. I care that he managed to recruit my men into his godforsaken schemes, that men of _my family_ turned their backs on us for a bloody snake charmer. I ought to take a page out of Gilgamesh’s book. Eye for an eye, eh, Shaun? Hand for a hand? I can use the knife they put in my back and cut their fucking throats with it.”

Shaun’s hands are shaking. Hers are absolutely still. “Sir, not all of them had a choice.”

“’course there was a choice.” Brannigan shrugs with his good shoulder. “There’s always a choice, Shaun. Live and betray your family. Die and stay loyal. Know which one I would’ve picked.”

In her pocket, the phone buzzes. A call, not a text. _SM,_ the screen reads, and she doesn’t wait for permission. “Sir,” she says, and offers the android. Brannigan and Shaun both stop dead. She hasn’t spoken a word to either of them in the full two weeks she’s been here. She hasn’t had the need to. “Miss Manfredi.”

Brannigan shifts his weight on the mattress. He bites his tongue. “I don’t dance to that bitch’s tune.”

The phone stops ringing. A few seconds later, it begins again, humming against her fingers.

“She doesn’t like to be kept waiting,” she says. “And she never calls a third time.”

He bares his teeth, in pain, not in fury. Brannigan stares at the phone, and then snatches it from her palm. “Took you long enough,” he says. “With all that talk about old alliances, I’d have thought you had more to offer than one woman who can’t finish the bloody job.”

She can’t hear whatever it is that Vanessa says, but it gives Brannigan a look like he’s just bit into a boiled egg and realizing it’s rotten. It could mean any number of things, really. Vanessa could have insulted him, or she could have pointed out the obvious, or she could have been insulting in pointing out the obvious, namely, that the only reason Finn Brannigan is alive is that she sent Maya Lopez to ensure his survival. The fact that Maya had been distracted enough to let him get shot is an entirely different matter, and one she’s already punished herself for. Brannigan’s eyes snap up to her as Vanessa speaks, and he’s very careful when he speaks next, shaping the words deliberately, like he’s crafting blades. “I’ll kill who I please, Silvia Manfredi.”

That, at least, is an easy play. _The yakuza are coming. Let the vigilantes wipe the city clean for you, and then take them out._ It’s a solid strategy, one that the yakuza have been employing to great effect ever since Wilson Fisk was taken off the streets. ( _You’re Maya_ , the woman in the fur coat says. _I’m—I suppose I’m Wilson’s fiancée._ ) She’s just not entirely certain that Brannigan is going to be willing to follow that plan now that he’s spent two weeks in the basement of an old crackhouse with shotgun pellets in his shoulder and his knee blasted to smithereens. She’d be angry too, if she were him. Generally bad lighting and physical pain have never been particularly conducive to the appropriate mental state for more peaceful tactics.

“Don’t pander to me, woman, I don’t need your pretty words.”

She can almost hear Vanessa rolling her eyes from here. _Then use your brain, Mr. Brannigan._ He has to have one, to have kept out of police custody for so long. The gears of his mind are snapping along behind his eyes, clicking, running fast enough to smoke. He’s not stupid, Brannigan. He has to know the risks that would go into dragging Frank Castle from his hospital bed to have him torn to pieces, just like he has to be able to recognize the risks that would come from going after the Devil and the Angel of Mercy without an actual, logistical plan.

Maya has a plan. They have plans. They hadn’t anticipated Brannigan would be as easy to convince as he has been—though to be fair, the threat of death tends to have that sort of effect on a human mind, regardless of circumstances. (No, Daredevil and Lilith don’t kill on purpose, so far as anyone can tell, but that doesn’t mean that people haven’t wound up dead after coming into contact with them. The line between life and death becomes very thin when heavy batons are involved.) They have plans, and the plans seem to be working, in their own ways. Some are developing more slowly than she would like, but that can’t be helped. It’s not as though she’d ever made any headway on her own, anyway.

Brannigan lifts his eyes to her again. His mouth is all city, concrete and broken glass. “Your little friend here has been less of an ally and more of a poltergeist. Hasn’t said a word in days.”

“Nobody said a word to me,” Maya says. “Besides, my job isn’t to talk. It’s to make sure someone keeps you alive.”

“So you let a fucking psychopath shoot me in the shoulder while you’re caught up in your little ballerina fight?”

 _It could be worse_ , she almost says. _You could have been shot in the face._ Brannigan and Castle had been out of her line of sight; she wouldn’t have known, not without Lilith snarking, trying to distract her. She’d weighed fighting with Lilith and winning over rescuing Brannigan and losing, and Brannigan had come up the winner. Maya shrugs. “You survived.”

She thinks Brannigan might want to hit her. His face shifts, jaw tightening, eyes flicking a little like he’s looking for somewhere to aim. Then he laughs, and turns his face away. She can’t tell what he says next. When he hands the phone back to her, the screen reads _call ended_.

“Shaun,” he says. “Leave us.”

Shaun goes roughly the color of glue. “Finn—”

“My boy was soft on you lads, I think,” Brannigan says. “Softer than he ought to have been, maybe. And it’s been a rough couple of weeks, so you’ll get a pass from me, Shaun, for not listening to a direct order the first time. Next time it happens, I’ll take an ear. Clearly you’re not usin’ ‘em, anyway.”

Not glue, she thinks. Snow. Ice. Shaun’s pale, white, and that means fear hangs on him like a shroud, like snowbanks on a clean hillside. He leaves the room without another word, shuts the door behind him. Brannigan rolls the bottle of pills between his hands.

“You’re one of them, aren’t you?”

“One of who?”

“Don’t play dumb with me, girl.” Brannigan shifts on the bed, pushing back until he’s propped against the headboard, his ruined knee laid out on the mattress in front of him. “Silvia didn’t say anything, not explicitly. She said to ask you what you can do. Figure that means you have to be able to do something special. She wouldn’t have said as much otherwise.”

No, Brannigan isn’t stupid. It might be easier if he were, but he isn’t. Neither is Vanessa, and neither is Maya. Together, maybe, they can find a balance somehow. So long as Brannigan doesn’t take a knife and slit their throats. “I’m not particularly complicated.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“I don’t think I’m obligated to answer any question you ask,” she says. “I’m only here to make sure you stay alive while you complete your end of the bargain.”

He wants to hit her again. His mouth twists and turns. “I knew men like you,” he says. “Before I left for Dublin. None of them ever answered, either, but it didn’t keep ‘em from being able to winkle their way through walls.”

Maya bites the inside of her cheek.

“What do you do?” He cocks his head. “Nothing too flashy, really. The Manfredi woman could have the balls to send a mind reader, but I doubt that’s what you are. Met a man in Paris who could spit poison when he wanted. A woman in Warsaw who could speak a language if she sat and listened to it for a minute or two. Kid who could throw fire.” Brannigan cups his chin in his good hand. “What are you, girl?”

“An echo,” Maya says. “What do you need me to do?”

.

.

.

Predictably, Foggy’s not happy.

“I still don’t see why this guy deserves the benefit of the doubt.” He slams the door to the taxi, heaves his bag over his shoulder. “After everything he’s done—”

“They killed his family, Foggy,” Matt says.

“Yeah, and that doesn’t mean he gets to go around shooting up the city and cutting people’s hands off—which we still don’t know what he did with that dude’s hand, and somehow that’s disturbing me more than basically anything else about this case—”

“Even more than the holes punched through Kevlar?” Darcy thumbs through the receipts in her wallet. _Oy._ “That’s impressive.”

“It was random and possibly irrational dismemberment. Which, by the way, is not the most therapeutic way to deal with extreme trauma—”

“Not saying that what he did was good for anybody, just that he had his reasons for doing it.”

“Yeah, and the Son of Sam had his reasons for killing people too. Namely that his neighbor’s Labrador was apparently the Devil. Just saying: cool motive, still murder.”

Next to her, Karen goes very stiff and still. It’s only once Darcy’s squeezed her hand and drawn away again that she relaxes. “Can we stop arguing about this?” Her voice is brittle. “We argued about this in the office and we argued about this in the cab and this is happening, okay? It should only be for a couple of hours and then we can just…you don’t have to worry about it anymore.”

“I’m still just deeply uncomfortable that you—” Foggy points at Darcy “—are apparently okay with showing this guy your face again.”

“Frank doesn’t give a shit about who I am, Foggy.”

“You can’t know that for sure. And from what you’ve said he’d probably sell his own kidneys to get his hands on Finn Brannigan, if he thought giving you up to Reyes would get him that—”

“He won’t,” Matt says.

“I don’t get why the pair of you are still so willing to trust this guy after everything he did!”

 _Because he’s like us._ Darcy bites her tongue. _Because no matter what he thinks of our methods, he doesn’t want us put away, and he definitely doesn’t want us dead._

“He won’t.” Darcy squeezes Foggy’s arm. “Besides, it’s only the one meeting. We go in, we get him to take us on, we get him to plead guilty in the arraignment—which he will, I think—and then we go. You never have to deal with him again, and you don’t have to worry about me.”

Foggy rolls his eyes at the sky. “Every time you say that it just makes me worry more. It usually means you’re about to do something incredibly stupid.”

“You have the patience of an actual saint and the brain of a scholar, sir.” She knocks into his side. “Frank won’t do anything. Not to me and not to Matt. He’s—hm.”

“Are you trying to think of a way to describe this guy that isn’t _crazy_ or _psycho_ or _murderer_?”

“Quit with the words, Foggy,” Karen says, still in that brittle voice. Sharp, like shattered plastic. “The words are unhelpful.”

“Frank’s a lot of things, but he’s not…” Darcy bites her tongue. “He wouldn’t sell us out to Reyes. He’ll do a lot of reprehensible shit, but he’d draw the line at something like that.”

“Your funeral,” says Foggy. “Also ours, because accessories. Mostly your funeral, since it’s debatable he’ll even recognize Matt with the glasses and the blindness and the _I’m a normal damn person_ suit—”

Matt makes a face.

“—but yeah, funerals. And disbarring. And possible life sentences.”

“We’ll be fine.” She pushes her glasses up her nose. “He might actually be more willing to listen, if he recognizes me. You never know. Now, what the hell is with the crowds?”

The crowds are reporters. Ben’s not there (she has a feeling he’s already been and gone, ages ago, way back when Frank was first hospitalized) but the main entry is crammed to the gills with people from basically every newspaper and major news site in the city. Castle’s been asleep for a fortnight, kept sedated, and now he’s awake, and everyone’s dropping on the body like flies. A few of the reporters blink and start whispering when they see them, the gaggle of Nelson, Murdock & Lewis heading for the elevators, but thankfully Karen’s rapid fire on the _close doors_ button shuts them up before they can get a full question out. Foggy looks constipated. “And there we go, we’re in the spotlight.”

“We were in the spotlight last year with the TMZ interview, too. Not that different.”

“That,” he says, “was supposed to be your deal. And I did it because I was nice and because you looked like someone had used a baseball bat on your face and no makeup artist in the world would have been able to clear that up, but I _still_ get recognized on the subway because of it. It’s really not okay with me. I like my anonymity, it’s reassuring. Having little old ladies come up to me and say _you were on TV with that transgender girl_ isn’t really fun, just FYI. Even if it did get the firm hella publicity.”

Speaking of. “Shit. Karen, did you tell Ben we were coming here?”

“Was I supposed to?”

 _New message to Ben Urich: from me to you—NM &L may in the next ten minutes become Frank Castle’s official legal counsel. Depending on how high he is right now._ And sent. “I told him if I learned anything about Castle I would tell him first. And, uh. This counts, I think.”

“Oh,” Karen says. “Oops.”

_New message from Ben Urich: ARE YOU FUCKING INSANE_

_New message from Ben Urich: WHY AM I EVEN ASKING THAT_

_New message from Ben Urich: WHERE ARE YOU_

“You sure that’s the best idea, spreading it all over the internet that we’re gonna do this?” Foggy taps her arm with his elbow. “No going back if you do.”

 _New message to Ben Urich: In the hospital. The vultures downstairs saw me but I think they think we’re heading for Grotto, nobody said a word._ “I think you’re the only one of us that wants to go back, Fog.”

“Because the rest of you are batshit,” Foggy says, exasperated.

 _New message from Ben Urich: I can’t decide if you’d do better with a time-out or a lobotomy._ “But you love us,” Darcy says.

“Despite my best instincts.”

 _New message to Ben Urich:_ _Turning off my phone, Uncle Ben, don’t be cross if I don’t respond._ “You have excellent instincts. Probably the best out of all of us. Which says really terrible things about the rest of us.” The elevator doors chime. “And game on, ladies and gents.”

“Onto the proscenium stage,” Foggy says under his breath, and leads the way out the door.

Everyone’s cross, though, really. Brett’s cross—“ _Detective_ Mahoney,” Foggy says, and Brett makes a face at him that’s about as intimidating as a kitten falling off a pillow—and Ben’s probably cross that she forgot to mention this until last minute, and Reyes will _definitely_ be cross when she hears about this. “Try not to tell the DA we’re in here until you can’t help it,” Matt says, as they’re searched again. “We’d owe you.”

“You people are _batshit_ ,” says Brett. “Career suicide is what this is. The pair of you—” he points, at Darcy, at Karen “—shouldn’t even be here, you’re probably going to be called as witnesses for the prosecution. He took potshots at you, if you don’t remember.”

“Trust me,” Karen says. “I remember exactly what he did and didn’t do.”

“Castle’s going to be arraigned, there’s no way this is going to trial.” Darcy scowls at the guy running the metal detector up and down her legs. “Bro, you don’t need to do it six times, it’s not like I’m carrying a razor or something.”

“Being thorough,” he says, under his breath.

“Be thorough somewhere else,” says a voice, and it’s Brigid O’Reilly who nudges him out of the way and takes the wand. Darcy blinks.

“Long time no see, stranger. I thought you were at Midtown North now.”

“They called in a few of us for watch duty.” She shrugs. “Few of the cops from the 15th were considered unable to fulfill their duties when they were found in Castle’s hospital room with a syringe full of acid.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“They’ve been fired,” Brett says. “And arrested. They’ll be dealt with. Lotta people were unhappy with what Castle did to the Kitchen, Lewis, wasn’t just gangsters.”

“And you keep telling me cops are infallible fucking saints.” Darcy turns, and glares at the elevator doors as Brigid sweeps the wand down her back, over her ass. “A syringe full of acid, what the fuck kind of plan did they have, stab him in the eyeball and fill his brain with it?”

“They hadn’t exactly managed to get further than _steal it from the forensics lab and use it however they deemed necessary._ ” Brigid coughs. “So far as I can tell.”

“Jesus Christ,” Darcy says again.

“Bastard didn’t even wake up. We caught them on video before they could do anything.”

“Video?” Matt takes his cane back. “You have audio-visual equipment in there?”

“In the walls.” Brett scoffs, and shakes his head. He’s still going through Darcy’s purse, bit by bit, and she’s _really_ glad she left Turk’s gun in her desk now. “You think we’re gonna leave him in there without being supervised? I don’t care if he _is_ on enough dope to knock an elephant over, we’re not taking risks with this guy.”

“I want them turned off.”

Brett scowls. “No.”

“Attorney-client privilege, Brett,” says Foggy. “We need them off.”

“That scumbag ain’t your client, Nelson.”

“Yeah, but we want them off anyway, and we have a right to that if we’re going into a legal meeting with the guy.” Foggy crosses his arms over his chest. “Brett, seriously. We just need ten minutes with him. We’re not gonna let him go anywhere, there aren’t any windows in that room, we’re storeys off the ground, and if he overpowers one of us then there are like seven of you out here to take his ass down before he gets halfway down the hall. Ten minutes of silence on the A/V end of things isn’t gonna kill anyone, least of all Reyes.”

“I fuckin’ hate you all sometimes,” Brett says. “Ten minutes. By my count, not yours. I’ll knock on the door when it’s off, again at the one minute mark, and again when it’s turned back on, and for fuck’s sake, do not bring anything in there with you. Don’t take anything out, either. Don’t cross the tape, don’t touch him, don’t let him out of his restraints, and I swear to God, it’ll be my extreme pleasure to arrest your ass and drag you out of there if you break any of those rules.” He eyes Darcy for some reason, as he says this. “I don’t need him strangling one of you. Too much paperwork.”

“And you’d miss us,” Darcy says. Brett gives her a look, and gives her purse back to her. His hands catch on the handles, just for a moment, his eyes flicking to hers. Then he turns, and walks away without another word.

“Aw, look at that.” Foggy looks pleased. “He does care. He’d miss us if we died.”

“Your crush on Brett is actually my lifeblood,” Darcy says, and Foggy’s nose turns pink. “Don’t ever stop being the weird goobers you are.”

“I don’t—” Foggy scuffs his hair out of his eyes. “Shut up, Lewis.”

Brett’s left a note in her purse, a scrap of a post-it folded in half, vivid blue against the red and gold of her wallet. ( _Gryffindor, bitches._ ) When she turns it right side up, it reads, _old contact says Finn asking questions about DD/L. DON’T BE STUPID._ She crumples it up in her fist, and shifts things around until the note is at the very bottom of her bag.

“Can we go in now?” Karen heaves her purse over her shoulder. “Only I don’t want to stand here and let Reyes catch up.”

“Faster is better,” Matt says, still holding his cane. (Brigid had hissed at the cops who’d tried to take it away, which Darcy kind of wants to hug her for. She’s pretty sure Brigid would bite—she’s from the Kate Bishop school of affection—but she wants to anyway.) “One of the cops is already calling her office to let them know someone’s here.”

“Names?”

“No, just _defense attorneys._ ”

“We have a little time, then,” Darcy says.

Karen’s the one to open the door.

Aside from the medical equipment, from the bed and the walls, the room itself is empty. Tile, and wood, and antiseptic in the air. Blood. Matt, next to her, is standing stiff, hand clenched tight around his cane. He hates hospitals, she remembers. Hates the smell, hates the memories. ( _I couldn’t stop what I was hearing, couldn’t control it, and every time I visit a hospital it all comes back. Puts my teeth on edge._ ) She doesn’t reach out to him, not in front of Frank, but she does hum in the back of her throat in a way that makes his mouth curl. Matt hooks his pinkie finger around hers for a split second, and then steps away from her, careful to keep distance between them, just in case. A few seconds after they shut the door, Brett knocks three times. Ten minutes, starting now.

“Oh my god,” Karen says.

Yeah. _Oh my god._ Frank looks like absolute hell. Two weeks on, and his face is still puffed to shit. There’s a terrible mark where she’d used the baton on his jaw, splits in his cheek and his eyebrows, a break over the bridge of his nose that’s taped down but still vilely dark. It’s the straps, though, that are bothering her. He’s tied to the bed. One thick strap over his stomach, holding his arms to the mattress. The other’s over his calves, pinning him there. _How is he supposed to heal like that?_ There’s a lump under the blankets from what can only be a cast over his knee, and when the door clicks shut and Brett knocks Frank Castle’s eyes slit open very slowly. Even beat to shit in a catacomb, she thinks, he’d never looked beaten. He looks beaten now.

His eyes drift. Matt, first, since Matt’s moved until he’s standing ahead of them, like he’s placing himself between Frank Castle and the rest of them. Then to Foggy, who swallows; Karen, who does nothing, who just looks at him with her hands tight around her files; and finally to Darcy. He drifts and then he fixes, and she can see his throat work from here.

“Cat,” he says, after a moment. “The fuck you doin’ here?”

 _And there goes the hope he doesn’t recognize me._ Which, honestly, she’s not sure she had much hope of that in the first place. Frank Castle had dragged himself back to life after flatlining in a hospital bed three floors away from here; she’s not sure he wouldn’t recognize her in a burqa. Foggy shuts his eyes, and sighs, and Darcy cups his elbow before slipping past Matt, stopping on the edge of the tape.

“Trying to save your dumb ass, apparently.” She puts her hands on her hips. “You look like shit.”

Frank’s eyes flicker, half-shut, half open. “The fuck happened to your voice?”

“The accent comes and goes. Like herpes, I don’t know.”

Some little half-amused noise tangles in the back of his throat. Frank leans back into the pillows, closes his eyes again. “Where’s your boy Red?”

 _Do not react, Foggy. Don’t do it._ “Working.” Fuck it. She steps over the tape (behind her, Foggy makes a noise like a balloon with a pinhole in it), rests her hand on the edge of the bed. Frank blinks at her again, very slowly. He’s drugged, probably. His pupils are blown to shit. “How many painkillers they have you on, do you have any clue?”

“Nope.”

“Darcy,” Foggy says again, and when she looks around he’s stricken, terror on his face, under his skin. “The tape, if someone sees you—”

“Cameras are off. Besides, we’ll hear someone coming, remember?” She sighs, and knocks one fist very lightly to Frank’s shoulder. She only realizes after she does it how weird it is, to whack a mass murderer in the shoulder, especially after all the shit he’s done to her, and to Matt, and to every one of them, really. Still, she doesn’t draw back. “Seriously, man. You look like shit.”

His eyes drift again, from Darcy to Foggy to Matt to Karen. His lips thin out. “Yeah, well. Lilith’s fault.”

 _And there you go. Knew it_. “Lilith’s good at what she does.”

“Sure.” He turns his head to the side, stares at the wall. He looks improved, at least, from the last time she’d seen him. Graveyards and catacombs and thorns. But also worse, because there’s something awful and hollow where there used to be stone and ice. _What happened?_ Brannigan’s still out there, she expected more fight than this.

“Darcy,” Foggy says, and Frank’s eyes snap to him. He loses all the blood in his face. “Ah, yeah. We only have ten minutes.”

“Forgot.” Darcy draws her hand away from the bed. “Frank, these are my legal partners. Franklin Nelson—” she points, and Foggy waves, half-hearted; his fingers are shaking “—and Matthew Murdock. And our assistant, Karen Page. Nelson, Murdock, and Lewis, that’s us. Dunno if I told you before.”

His eyes flicker again. “You’re the firm that was protecting that shitbag Grotto.”

“Who played us,” Karen says, low and hoarse. “If you remember.”

“He’s in a coma,” Darcy says, just as quiet, but Frank snaps to her again. “He might not wake up.”

“Better off dead.”

“Most people aren’t so fucking stubborn they yank themselves out of vegetative stakes, Jarhead. I don’t think he’s gonna get up and walk around anytime soon.”

The little cracking sound breaks free of him again. “Givin’ me a headache with all your sniping.”

“Pretty sure headaches can be good for you sometimes.”

He rasps in the back of his throat, and shuts his eyes. “The hell are you doing here?”

“Like I said, trying to keep your dumb ass from being executed.” She doesn’t touch him again, but she does leave her fingertips resting on the bedspread. It’s her left hand, the scarred one, and Frank narrows his eyes at the mark before looking up at her face. “Which I don’t think you want.”

“That’s new,” he says. “New scar. How old is it?”

“Not your business.”

“What’s it from?”

“I play Russian roulette sometimes.”

His mouth thins. “Bullshit.”

“Can we stay on topic?” Foggy checks his watch. “Seven minutes left.”

“Stay out of it, Cat,” Frank says. “I’m not your fucking crusade. Not yours, not Red’s.”

“Mr. Castle.” It’s Matt, Matt Murdock The Lawyer, nothing close to the devil, but she still watches Frank’s face for a flicker, for anything. There isn’t one. _Nobody expects the blind man._ “We’re not here for a crusade, or for attention, or for money.”

“You’re here ‘cause of her.” Frank doesn’t look at her. “Don’t say you aren’t.”

“Partially.” Matt curls both hands around his cane, propping it against his chest. “Darcy didn’t tell us how she knew you, Mr. Castle, but we’re all willing to trust her judgment. And even if we weren’t, it doesn’t change the fact that you have more enemies than the gangsters you were killing.”

Frank scoffs, and looks away again.

“Someone wants you dead,” Karen says. “You’ve been in this hospital before. The last time they put a Do-Not-Resuscitate order on you, and the only reason you’re alive is because you were too damn stubborn to die.”

Frank looks at Darcy, then at Karen. “You—”

“And a few weeks ago in the sting with Grotto they put a shoot-to-kill on you,” Foggy says. His voice trembles a bit, and then holds. “We know, we were there.”

“The District Attorney’s office wants you dead, Mr. Castle.” Matt rocks on his feet. “We don’t know why, but they’ve come down hard on us ever since we started asking questions, and we’d like to find out. We’d also like, if possible, to stymie her in any way possible, because frankly, she’s pissed all of us off.”

“None of us want you to die,” Karen says. “If you let her walk all over you, if you keep that public defender they’ve assigned you, that’s what’s gonna happen.”

“Personally I don’t care how long you’re in prison for, but—yeah.” Foggy shrugs. “DA’s aiming for you to be extradited to Delaware. New York doesn’t allow for the death penalty. Thanks to those bikers you blew up on the highway, Delaware’s a viable option.”

“It’s not a crusade,” Darcy says. “It’s helping all of us get answers.”

Frank turns, and looks at the wall again.

“You want answers,” Karen says, and fumbles with her files. A photograph, she has a photograph, the photograph she’d found in the house with Frank Castle and a woman and two children and a family and a life and a smile. In a second she’s over the tape and offering it with one hand, and Frank’s eyes are blowing wide as bullet holes. “You want answers, we want answers, we can’t get those answers if you’re dead, Mr. Castle, the truth about—”

“Where did you get that?” The straps creak over his wrists. “ _Where did you get that_?”

“I was in your home, Mr. Castle, I went—”

“Karen, Jesus—”

“You were in my _house_?”

“Darcy,” Matt says, and then there’s a rap on the door. Darcy barely gets her arm around Karen’s waist and hustles them out of the taped zone by the time Brett’s herding them all out.

Jen’s standing at Reyes’s shoulder. She looks exhausted. There are rings under her eyes, her hair’s flat, and her suit—still sharp, really—looks like something she’s been in for two days. Tower doesn’t look much better. _How fast must you be working to get your case together for the arraignment tonight?_ She has no idea. _Christ, Jen._ Jen looks at her for a long time, and the expression on her face—Darcy’s never seen her look like that before. Completely and utterly blank. Tower’s half-amused. Reyes, though: Reyes has a bee up her nose. “What the _hell_ do you people think you’re doing? Get out of here, now.”

“Nice to see you too,” Foggy says under his breath. “We weren’t actually done, yet.”

“You’re done when I say you are.” Reyes folds her arms tight over her chest. “You have no right to interfere in this case, you’re violating conflict of interest, not to mention the fact that one of your partners _and_ your secretary—”

“Legal assistant,” Karen says in an icy voice.

“—were victims of this man, are you actually so criminally stupid—”

“Forgive me for interrupting.” Ah, hell. That’s Matt’s shit-eating lawyer voice. Not the lawyer voice, that’s different. This is the _how many ways can I piss you off with pretty words without you realizing why you’re getting angry_ voice. “But so far as I know, officially, neither my assistant or my partner were able to recognize the validity of the witness statements that were delivered today, as in their own words they were never personally threatened by Mr. Castle, regardless of our affiliation with Elliot Grote. Which, interesting conundrum—our work with Mr. Grote seems to have vanished from public record as well. So unless there's something the District Attorney’s office would like to acknowledge, there doesn’t seem to be much of a conflict at all.”

Tower’s eyebrows shift to _polite disbelief_ , and stay there. Darcy barely notices. She’s still watching Jen, Jen and her blank face and the hunch to her shoulders and the look of her, worn to shreds. _Jenny, what have they done?_

Foggy catches her wrist, squeezes a bit. He’s seen Jen, too. His forehead puckers, and wrinkles.

Reyes crosses her arms tight over her chest. “Are you threatening me, Mr.— I don’t believe we’ve had the pleasure before now. You would be Mr. Murdock, correct?”

“On my good days,” Matt says, which, _hah_ , she kind of wants to laugh and that’s a bad idea right now.

“I thought you were supposed to be smarter than this,” says Reyes. “The three of you are asking for it.”

“Not to belabor the point, but by inviting her here—” Foggy nods at Jen. “You have your own conflict of interest, Miss Reyes, what with Nelson, Murdock and Lewis taking on Mr. Castle’s case.”

“Castle has counsel.”

“He’s changed his mind,” Brigid says, slipping out of the hospital room. “Says he wants them. Won’t talk to Roth anymore.”

Darcy can’t help it. She preens a little. “Well, there you go. According to your own paperwork, no muss, no fuss. Just a couple of attorneys looking to give a God-fearing American veteran his constitutionally mandated right to counsel. ”

Jen doesn’t smile, but her lips definitely twitch. It’s the first expression she’s had this whole time. When Darcy catches her eye, the look fades into something quietly, fiercely approving, like she’s just seen Darcy score a winning point in a fencing match.

 “Personally I think it’d be fascinating if some of the reporters downstairs heard that the District Attorney herself is interfering in the private legal counsel of an alleged felon.” Matt tips his head. “Considering the breach of ethics.”

“What is that supposed to be, is that supposed to be a threat?” Reyes trills a laugh. “It’s not a particularly good one. The vultures downstairs all work for rag-mags; their readers don’t give a damn about whether or not anyone’s breaching conflict of interest.”

“See, that’s interesting, because I know a lot of people who’d be really intrigued.” Foggy turns to Darcy. “Don’t you have Ben Urich on speed dial?”

“Why, look at that,” Darcy says, “I do. You think I should call him?”

“Why not?” Foggy shrugs. “We can make it a party.”

“To which all of you are very cordially invited,” says Matt.

“Or not cordially,” says Karen. “But you’re invited all the same.”

“Like an unbirthday party,” Darcy says. “Only with corruption.”

“You keep talking about kicking the hornet’s nest, Miss Reyes,” Foggy says, “but the fact of the matter is, out of all of us, you’re the only one who really isn’t supposed to be here. We can blaze that all over the city if you want, there’s nothing you can actually do to stop us—go ahead and try to ruin our careers, it won’t matter. We managed to get through Fisk, we can get through you. And even if we don’t, I’ll make it my job to take you down with us.”

“Is that a threat, Mr. Nelson?”

“Nah,” says Foggy. “More equivalent exchange. We go down, you go down. It’s not hard to understand.”  

“I should call Ben back anyway. He’s been grumpy with me lately.” Darcy sighs. “We’re all very close, after what happened with Kate Bishop, and besides—Ben still has a lot of contacts at the _Bulletin_. Even if he doesn’t want to take on the story, I’m betting that Ellison will.”

“And on that note,” Matt says, “we have work to do. If you’ll excuse us.”

She thinks that Samantha Reyes’s head might actually explode. She turns, and stalks off, her little rat hands ( _God fucking bless Brooklyn 99 for that descriptor_ ) curled into claws at her sides. Tower follows her without a word, eyebrows climbing up his forehead. Jen lingers, though. She looks back at them, not once but twice, at the group, and then at Darcy, lips parted. Something flickers across her face that might be shame. When she catches up with Reyes, she says something too low for Darcy to make out, but it has Reyes turning and snapping, too low for Darcy to hear. Matt winces, though.

“What’d she say?”

She can actually _see_ him censoring it in his head. “Something about loyalty.”

 _Fucking hell._ You don’t question Jen’s loyalty. You _don’t_. For only the barest moment, she considers ripping Samantha Reyes’s pretty blonde hair out of her stupid scalp. Matt has his hand on her elbow before she can move. _Thanks, Murdock, stop me from defending my sister’s honor, very helpful._ She bites her tongue. “ _Very cordially invited_?”

Matt pinches her wrist. “You brought up _Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland._ ”

“Yeah, _after._ You made it sound like Captain Jack Sparrow’s tea party in the desert of insanity.” Jen and Reyes are still arguing. “Foggy, you okay?”

“I’m fine.” He still looks a bit glassy-eyed, like he’s walked into a porch screen. “Just—I just told the District Attorney it was okay for her to try and crush us like beetles under her shoe.”

“You did.” Darcy claps him on the back. “It was badass.”

“ _I_ just did that,” he says again. “ _I_ just told her that. Me.”

“Because you are the most badass badass in the town of Badass.”

“I spend too much time around you two,” says Foggy, hollow. “It makes me reckless and stupid.”

“Or reckless and badass.”

“I don’t want to wind up working at Baskin Robbins at the tender age of twenty-six.”

“Retail isn’t so bad if you fantasize about stabbing people in the eyeball while you work the counter.” Karen’s very quiet when Darcy turns to her, staring at the wall like it’s a Monet. “Kare?”

“What?”

“You okay?”

“Fine.”

Like that’s believable. “Are you—”

“If you have something to say to me, Walters, say it.” It’s Reyes. Not panicked Reyes, not grasping Reyes, not bitch!Reyes, but the Samantha Reyes who rules the New York courtroom, the Good Damn Attorney, the woman who’s demanded respect since the moment she stepped onto the campus of Fordham Law. She’s glowering at Jen, and Jen—Jen is standing and staring, still and calm the way an ocean can be, before a whirlpool sucks you under. “Never figured you for the type that would wind up whispering behind my back.”

Jen doesn’t flinch. She stands straighter. She towers over Reyes, and even with exhaustion hanging from her like a toddler around her throat, she’s still, in that moment, just as much of a queen as Reyes ever was.

“I’ll be b-blunt,” she says. “I will not be party to this. I will not sacrifice justice and fairness and the law to the highest bidder in the name of political gain. I refuse to be a part of this any longer.”

Reyes’s lips turn blade thin. She presses her hands flat against her sides. “Are you saying you’re resigning?”

“Yes,” says Jen, and Darcy’s heart nearly stops. “I am.”

“I thought you were better than this,” Reyes says after a moment. “You know better than to let family get in the way of your job, Walters.” 

Matt seizes her arm again. “Darcy,” Foggy says, and he grabs her other elbow before she can make a sound. Darcy hisses through her teeth. Matt and Foggy are holding her back and she has to bite her tongue to keep from shouting, because _fuck you, how dare you say that, how dare—_

“My sister is beside the point,” Jen says. “This is a matter of my own conscience. If this is how you’re going to run the office from now on, Miss Reyes, then I w-want nothing to do with it. I’ll be there to clean out my desk tomorrow morning.” Jen pulls the pencil from her hair, shakes it back out of her face. She says, “I resign. And if you come near Frank Castle again, I’ll be the first to file a complaint with the US Attorney’s Office.”

Reyes stares at Jen, and Jen stares back in silence. Reyes is the one to look away first. When she turns away, into the elevator with Tower at her side, Jen doesn’t follow. She stands there, at the end of the hall, her hands balled up and white to the lips with—not sadness. Fury, maybe. Brett, by the door to Frank’s room, clears his throat and shuffles his feet like a schoolboy, and it breaks the spell. Jen turns, and slams into the bathroom without a word, the door swinging back and forth behind her. Then, and only then, does Foggy let go of her. Matt rubs his thumb down the crease of her elbow, and hangs on.

“Holy shit,” Foggy says. “I think my heart just exploded.”

Karen wets her lips. “Did Jen just get fired?”

“That wasn’t a firing, that was Jen throwing a fucking grenade in the DA’s face.” Foggy runs his hands through his hair. “Holy shit.”

Darcy bites her lip. “You guys get to work, I’m gonna check on her.”

“Is that a good idea?”

“She’s my sister,” Darcy says, and draws away. “I don’t think it matters whether or not it’s a good idea. You guys go get started on going over Frank’s case files, I’m gonna—yeah.”

Matt tugs at her sleeve, presses a kiss to her temple. Foggy flicks her a thumb’s up. Darcy smiles at Karen, half-forced, and makes for the bathroom.

She’s prepared, sort of, to talk at Jen through the door of the bathroom stall, or to keep her from smashing a mirror with the heel of her shoe, or to stand there and bitch Reyes out for as long as it takes for Jen to get that awful, hollow look off her face. When she gets into the bathroom, though, it’s quiet. Jen’s standing at the sink furthest from the door, hands braced around the ceramic, head bowed. She’s left her jacket in a puddle on the countertop. When Darcy pushes the door shut, Jen peeks at her from the corner of her eye. “Hey.”

“Hey.”

What to say now. _Shit._ “So, um.” Darcy lifts one shoulder. “If you wanna get drunk, I know a girl. She’s really good.”

Jen snorts, and stands up straighter, pushing her hair up out of her eyes. “Think I can d-do without the hangover, at the moment.” She peeks at Darcy again, and says, “I, um. I s-saw your post-it.”

That’s…not on topic. Her eyes sting. “I should’ve done more than send you a post-it.”

“I was in too deep. Besides, if you had, she would have b-buried both of us.” Jen presses the heels of her hands to her eyes. “Shit.”

 _Jen, swearing? End of the world._ “Is this your new home base?”

“M-Might as well be.” Jen links her hands at the back of her neck. “Since I just quit my job.”

“You just body-slammed Reyes to the floor, is what you did.”

She coughs. “Maybe.”

“Not maybe.” Darcy creeps forward. When Jen turns on the sink, cups water in her hands and wipes her face, Darcy’s the one to hand her the paper towels. “That was a verbal body-slam if I’ve ever seen one.”

Water drips from the point of her nose. “I j-just quit my job.”

“Yup.”

“I just quit my job,” Jen says again. “In—I q-quit my job.”

“You did.” Darcy waits. “You regret it?”

“I don’t know.”

Which isn’t a bad answer. Jen looks at the paper towels for a little while, like she doesn’t know what to do with them, and then hides her face. It’s only once she’s scrubbed her makeup off, thrown the paper towels in the trash, and accepted more that she says, “I should have done that months ago.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I thought she’d st-stop.” Jen peers at her face in the mirror, and dabs at the corners of her eyes. They’re redder than they ought to be, considering how calm she’s being. “What happened with G-Grotto was my wake-up call. She’s not g-going to stop until she gets her way, and that’s—Elliot Grote was the one who suffered for th-that.”

Her stomach hurts. “Him getting hospitalized?”

“No,” Jen says, and settles her glasses on her nose again. “The sting.”

There are needles twisting away under her fingernails. Jen shakes her head a few times, pressing her hands over her face. When she lifts her gaze, there are fresh red marks in the bridge of her nose where she’s smushed her glasses. “Darcy,” Jen says. “What—what happened with Grotto and the sting, I didn’t know until—”

“I didn’t think you did.”

She closes her eyes. Her shoulders drop. “Good.” Jen kneads at her forehead with one hand. “I—good.”

“You wouldn’t have done that to us, Jen,” Darcy says. “I know that. It was Reyes. And Tower, too, I think. But mostly Reyes.”

Jen looks down at her feet. There’s still a streak of water running down her cheek. “I used to respect her.” Darcy can barely hear it, over the hiss of the sink. “I used to respect her position, what she did. She was a _good_ defense attorney, Darcy. She was g-good at what she did. When I started at the office, she—she wanted to do good. She wanted to change this city for the better, wanted to clear out the people rotting it from the inside. And she d-did the best she could.”

“Fisk grew under her nose.”

“Fisk g-grew under all our noses. He started years before Reyes even took office.” Jen curls her fingers into the edge of the counter. “But she c-could have done a better job noticing.”

“People did notice. Fisk just killed them.”

“We all should have noticed.” She pushes her glasses back up her nose. “B-Before everything.”

“Yeah, well.” Darcy shrugs. “It’s done with, now. Mostly. Like everything with Grotto.” She peeks at Jen. “This would be the time to say _I told you so_.”

“I’m not going to say that.” Jen looks at herself in the mirror. “Neither of us were wrong, about our j-jobs. Just—I wish it hadn’t b-been you four, getting into the Punisher.”

“Kind of a little late for that.”

Jen props her hips against the counter, crosses her arms over her chest. “What are you d-doing, defending him, Darcy? He t-tried to kill you.”

 _He held a gun to my head, but it didn’t have any bullets._ Darcy turns off the sink, the metal of the faucet biting harsh into her scar. “Frank Castle might be a murderer, but he’s not insane, and he’s not a psychopath. And regardless of what he has or hasn’t done, letting Reyes get away with whatever shit she’s pulled isn’t on the agenda.”

She jerks her head in a little nod. Jen lifts her eyes to the ceiling. She looks so _tired_ , Darcy thinks. Without the makeup, the rings under her eyes are like thumbprints. Like bruises. “I quit my job,” she says again.

“You can find a new one.”

“You think R-Reyes will let me get away with q-quitting that way?” She presses her lips together. “I-I’d be lucky to g-get a job as a legal assistant.”

“Not everyone dances to Reyes’s tune, Jen.”

“Yeah, but—but th-there are enough.” Her voice wavers, quivers, like rippling water. “You know when I decided I wanted to be a lawyer?”

“Jen, you don’t—” Jen never talks about her mother. “It’s okay.”

“It was right after my mother died.” Jen swallows. “She was an attorney, she used to be—used to work at the DA’s office, b-before she had me. My d-dad, he’s a cop, but—but I w-wanted to do what she did. I thought—Dad, he’d c-catch the bad guys, but my mom, she—she made sure they c-could never do b-bad things again. And she was k-killed, she was murdered, and I thought, I want t-to do what she did. And m-make sure that d-doesn’t happen to anyone else.”

Darcy clasps her hands together in front of her. “Jenny—”

“I w-went into the DA’s office right out of law school, I’ve p-put t-ten years of my life into that job. I’m thirty-six. That’s three years older than my mom ever—” She swallows. “And I j-just quit.”

“It was the right thing to do, Jen.”

“Was it?” Jen taps her heel to the tile of the bathroom floor. “Or was it the—the lazy choice, the—I’m so tired, Darcy. I’m—I’m t-tired of fighting with people I love and I’m t-tired of wondering whether or not I’m d-doing the right thing, and I’m tired of secrets and t-tired of worrying about things I can’t change. I’m just—I’m tired.”

There’s a hole in her chest, and it keeps splitting wider. _I’m tired of secrets. I’m so, so tired of secrets._

Brett’s voice echoes through the bathroom door. Brigid’s laughing. Water drips in one of the stalls, hissing pipes. There’s a raven in her ribs. Jabbing with that wicked beak, clawing up her throat.  “You know what I do with tattoos, right?”

Jen blinks. “What does th-that have to do with anything?”

“You know why I picked a compass for you?” Darcy folds her fingers together. “Because you’ve—you’ve always pointed north. You’ve always done the right thing. Even when it was hard, you did the right thing, and you—you’re part of why I went to law school. You’re the only reason I didn’t turn out a complete disaster of a person. You’re true north, Jen. And I know I haven’t—I’ve been a shit sister, lately, and I haven’t told you things and we fought and everything else, but I don’t think you could ever do the wrong thing. It’s not in your DNA.”

Jen makes an odd little chirping noise. “Darcy.”

“You stood up to her because she’s doing something wrong, Jen. How is that not the right thing?”

“I could have fixed it. If I—If I’d stayed inside.”

“Maybe.” Darcy swallows. “Or maybe nothing would have changed.”

She curls her hands tight around the edge of the sink, knuckles popping in her skin.

“You loved your job,” Darcy says. “I know you loved your job. You were good at it.”

“The j-job I loved has been gone for ages, Darcy. It’s g-gone. First everyone we lost to Fisk, and n-now this, just—” She shrugs. “I’m supposed t-to be smart and I d-didn’t even notice all of it c-crumbling to p-pieces at my feet.”

 _Oh, Jen._ Darcy crosses the floor, and pulls Jen down into a hug. It’s kind of awkward, because Jen slips, nearly falls out of her shoes, but she catches herself. Coffee and ink, that’s Jen, and she makes a small, rough sound that seems to come all the way up from her guts before she droops, and lets Darcy hug her.  

“You,” Darcy says, “are not stupid. You were fooled same as everyone else. That doesn’t come close to making you stupid.”

“You didn’t.” Jen wipes at her red eyes. “The th-three of you, four of you, none of you fell for any of it.”

“Because we’re all suspicious as fuck and have huge problems with authority, those aren’t necessarily good things to be.”

“B-But you _saw it_ ,” Jen says again, low and fierce. “You saw it w-with Fisk, and you s-saw it with Reyes, and I d-didn’t.”

“We saw it with Fisk because Karen nearly died.”

“Still.”

“Jen, trusting your boss doesn’t make you stupid.”

“No.” She shakes her head, scuffing against Darcy’s hair. “It makes me naïve.”

Darcy sighs. “You’re not an idiot, Jen. I’m just not as lawful good as you are, that’s all.”

Jen squeezes tight. Darcy pulls a hand from the tangle, and pets at her back, at the knobs of her spine. Jen’s taller than her, heavier, taller than Matt even, and it’s awkward, torqueing back like this, but, y’know. This is Jen. It’s her sister. Her cousin and her big sister and the one person who kept her from going crazy after she left her mom, her sister who she wishes she could be more like, sometimes, the sister who’s never once lied to her, and here’s Darcy, who’s done nothing but lie for a full year.

“Are you still angry?” Her voice comes out much too young, too plaintive, like she’s fifteen again and asking _why didn’t my mom care enough to ask me to stay_. Which, holy shit, that’s a memory she doesn’t want to revisit. “About Grotto.”

Jen heaves a deep sigh. “You know that wasn’t what I was angry about, Darcy.”

Screw fifteen. She feels all of twelve. “Yeah, I know.”

“I just—” Jen steps back, then, but only enough that she can fuss with Darcy’s jacket, with her hair, and shit, she might not be the only one flashing back to five or eight or ten full years ago. “I wish you wouldn’t risk yourself. I wish you c-could trust me.”

She is _not going to cry_. Darcy looks at the floor, and starts counting, inhales and exhales, the way Matt does sometimes. _In for seven, out for eleven._ The pull and loose of her lungs beneath her ribs. This time, it’s not Darcy hugging Jen, but Jen hugging Darcy, petting at her hair and not saying a word when Darcy’s face gets a little too damp.

“I missed you,” Darcy says. It cracks. _I missed you and I needed someone to talk to about all of the shit I can’t say to Matt or Foggy or Karen and I couldn’t talk to you and it was awful._ “I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry I never texted you back,” Jen says, and Darcy chokes on a laugh, squishing her eyes shut.

“That sounds like a teen movie.”

“Still true.” She tugs her fingers through Darcy’s hair. Then, very clearly, she says, “I know there are things you aren’t telling me, Darcy.”

Ice. Ice down the back of her shirt, ice down her throat, frost crusting over her stomach and freezing her insides and snapping her to bits. Darcy stills, and starts to draw away. Jen holds on tighter. “I know why you didn’t think you could,” she says. “I was—with Fisk, and a-after, the DA was—it was. B-But I know there are things you haven’t told me, and I know that—I c-can guess what some of them are.”

 _Shit. Holy shit._ “Jen—”

“Darcy, I don’t—” Her hands fold up against Darcy’s shoulders. “If—If I’m right, then it doesn’t—I’m not angry. If I’m right, then—then I’m—” She stills. “I’m not as l-lawful good as you think I am.”

Darcy pulls back. Jen’s set her jaw, pressed her lips together, the face that means _I’ve decided and I’m not going back._ Not censure, she doesn’t think. Just determination. Her heart’s racing. _If that means what I think it means, then—shit._ She swallows, again and again, opens her mouth—

There’s only a bare instant between a knock and Karen poking her head into the bathroom. “Sorry,” she says, “but—but Castle wants to talk to you.”

Darcy blinks, slowly. “Me?”

“Yeah.”

“Not all of us?”

Karen shakes her head. “Just you, right now. Foggy and Matt tried to go in, but he wouldn’t say a word to them. Or to me,” she adds. “I mean, well. He said more to me. He asked—things. But he has something he wants to talk to you about, and he won’t tell me, and he wouldn’t talk to Foggy and Matt at all. It has to be you.”

Jen’s eyes narrow, but she doesn’t say a word. She squeezes Darcy’s elbows. “Go,” she says. “I’ll b-be fine. I’m—I’m going to go home. Angie will box my things up for me.”

“Jen, I don’t—”

“When you’re ready to tell me,” Jen says, “I’ll be around.”

She slips past Karen out into the hallway. By the time Darcy follows her out, she’s already vanished into the elevator, the doors shutting smoothly behind her.  

“Did that mean what I think it meant?” Karen says, thready. “Because if that meant what I think it meant, then—”

“—then it’s something to deal with later.” _Rock. You’re the rock, come on. Calm down before they freak out._ Darcy squares her shoulders. “Time for an interview.”

.

.

.

Miles Morales lives in Apartment 409, which is three floors up and two doors down from the people he’s supposed to watch. The people _Elena_ , Kate thinks, murderously, asked him to watch, because she’s very, very sure that this is another one of Elena’s Jane Austen style romantic plots. _Ask the one person in the whole building that you’re trying to pair me off with to help me keep an eye on some sketchy, possibly shooty, tenants. Then conveniently forget his phone number, and to talk to him, and to ask about what he’s seen, and say you’re too busy to do it yourself. Yeah._ Elena “Emma Woodhouse” Cardenas is all over this. And Darcy, too, but Darcy’s reasons for suggesting him had been rooted in some form of common sense. This is just…matchmaker-y bullshit.

He’s been keeping her informed, though. Keeping _them_ informed, anyway, she corrects herself, as she steps out of the elevator. He keeps them informed. The Ahagons just keep on doing the do and not showing their faces much at all aside from the noise complaints. There hasn’t been an incident in a good two weeks, but before, the people in Apartment 106 had said something about screeching noises every few nights. “Like metal scraping,” Esperanza had said. “Always at about three-thirty in the morning. Sometimes people would shout for hours and hours and hours. I’m never able to sleep on those nights.”

Esperanza has an eight-month-old baby, which means she barely sleeps anyway, but that’s beside the point. There are weird noises and weird smells and people who never open the door, and it’s suspicious as fuck. _Not proof that they’re yakuza_. Not really. They could be drug runners, or they could weld as a hobby ( _not in my building, damn you_ ), or they could just watch horror movies on really high volume, who knows. It doesn’t mean that they’re yakuza.

_I refuse to cast the only Japanese people in the building in the role of yakuza. I will not do that. I won’t._

….only Japanese people in the building aside from her.

_Sigh._

He’s home, at least. Miles does this thing with his door where if he’s not home, he leaves a paperclip on the back of the knob. She only noticed because it fell, when Elena had brought her up here the first time; it’s kind of wedged in an out-of-sight place, not taped but balanced, and if anyone were to try the door it would fall and probably do so unnoticed. Kate’s just paranoid and sees more than most people see. It’s weird, she thinks, and means he thinks someone’s going to try and get in someday, but that’s not her problem at the moment. No paperclip means Miles is present, and when she raps on the door, she can hear Omar Offendum through the wall. ( _Stereo and a mic / scenario of a fight / the burial of a white / imperial at its height—_ ) “Yo, Morales, up and at ‘em, come on.”

The music dims, a little. There’s a scrape. Not one lock but two, not two locks but three, and she’s really hoping he asked for permission before installing those because she doesn’t want to lecture the one ally she has in the building other than Elena. _Not ally. Enlisted recruit._ Not by her. _Chill._ When he opens the door up a bit, his eyes get huge real damn fast.  He’s barefoot, and someone’s put nail polish on his big toe for some reason, a shocking shade of orange. “Kate,” he says, blankly. “Bishop. Kate Bishop.”

“Yup.” She looks down the hall, and then lifts her eyebrows. “Can I come in?”

“Uh.” Omar Offendum is still curling away in the background. ( _The Karma of Inquisition / visions of horror / so who’s the explorer, really / was it Columbus? / Muhammad al-Idrisi or Alfaragnus—_ ) “Um, yeah. Sure—I just—hold on.”

He shuts the door, unchains it, and lets it stand open behind him. She’s pretty sure, judging by the clothes on the couch, that he’s only wearing a shirt because he checked through the peephole. Kate pointedly does not watch him kick a pair of dirty boxers under the couch.

“’scute,” she says, after a moment. He has Avengers merch on the windowsill, and textbooks all over the floor. Wrenches, too, and screwdrivers, but a lot of textbooks. The fourth floor had been the starting point for apartment bisection, so Miles’s apartment—one bedroom, a living room, and a kitchen tucked into the corner—had once belonged to Apartment 410. Which means this place is about half the size of Elena’s apartment, and should not possibly be able to house so many little gadgets as it is. “I like the socks on the lampshade.”

“Yeah, that was—yeah.” He snags them off the lamp. “An accident.”

 _Some accident._ Kate picks over the bowl of keys. “Is this a Lego Black Widow? I didn’t know they made Lego Black Widows.” She’s pretty sure Nat doesn’t even know they make Lego Black Widows. She’s going to have to find one and give it to her and have Clint record the look on her face. “Do they make Lego Hawkeyes?”

“Hawkeyes are really rare,” Miles says, and plucks the itty-bitty Nat from her fingers. “Did you, uh. I mean. Can I help you?”

Kate crouches, and collects what looks like a metal bird from the floor. It’s a robot, she thinks, unfinished. “I thought you said you were biochem.”

“I like building things.”

She turns the little bird over in her palm. “It’s pretty.”

“It’s not finished.” Miles fidgets. He can’t seem to look at her for too long, his eyes fixing and then darting away again, twitchy. “It’s just supposed to be a wind-up toy, I don’t know.”

“For who?”

Miles shrugs. “Maybe Elena. She likes birds.”

That’s a thought, Elena Cardenas with a tiny wind-up metal bird. Kate pours the little robot back into his palm. “She’d like it, I think.”

“Oh.” Miles curls his fingers over the robot, and clears his throat. “Um, are you here just—why are you here?”

“Wanted to ask about the Ahagons.” How the hell has he fit so much crap in here? Barring the clothing on the floor, because that’s normal, she has clothing all over _her_ floor. Or she would if Yoko didn’t pick it up all the time. This is like a thrift shop. Or a den of some sort. “Is that a lava lamp?”

“If it isn’t, I’m very confused by its existence,” Miles says. “The Ahagons haven’t done anything, really.”

“You sure?” She flicks the lava lamp on and off, and wanders into the kitchen this time. There’s a take-out box on the counter, pasta on the stove. “Did you make this?”

“I mean, yes, but—” Miles makes a weird noise when she sticks her finger in the sauce, wanders back out of the kitchen. “I haven’t noticed them doing anything, I kept an eye on it as best I could.  Elena said they were like—vandalizing or something?”

“There’s new graffiti in the building somewhere there shouldn’t be, is all, and it didn’t show up until they came, so.” It’s good damn pasta sauce, Jesus. Not okay. “Which I probably shouldn’t tell you, but whatever. How have you been keeping an eye on them, anyway?”

“I help Esperanza sometimes.” He trails after her like disaster relief after a hurricane. “I, uh—I mean. I haven’t seen anything, so there’s not a lot I can tell you, sorry.”

“Just wanted to check.” There’s a copy of _Far From the Madding Crowd_ on the side of the couch and she’s pretty sure it’s personal and not for school, judging by the age. “Is this yours?”

“It was my mom’s,” he says. “You ask a lot of questions.”

“I am by nature a curious beast.” _Far From the Madding Crowd_ and _North & South _is here, too, and _Little Women_. _Great Expectations. David Copperfield. Mansfield Park. A Farewell to Arms. The Bell Jar._ It’s like a treasure trove. Kate crouches again, balancing on her toes, and peers at the bookshelf. She’s being incredibly rude, and she doesn’t really care, at this point. “Do you always watch people when the old lady you helped with her groceries asks you to, or is that a new thing for you?”

“Not very new, no.” Miles’s eyebrows creep together. “Does your neck hurt?”

“Hm?”

“The bruise.”

 _Thanks, mugger, for getting that lucky shot in. I appreciate it._ “I do krav maga and my partner’s really mean to me. I’m fine.”

“Oh.”

“Your mom has good taste in books.”

His mouth clenches. “She’s, um. She’s actually dead.”

“Oh.” _Way to put a foot in it, Katie_. “Mine is too,” Kate says, and stands again. “If you hear anything about the Ahagons, tell me and not Elena, okay? If there’s something weird going on, I want her as far out of it as possible. She doesn’t need any more shit.”

Miles’s hand slips as he’s fumbling through the laundry, sending a few T-shirts to crash to the floor. “Any more shit?”

“She should tell you, not me, but—yeah.” Kate swipes the shirts up off the floor. One of them reads _Oscorp_ , which is another tidbit she hadn’t expected. She’s pretty sure it’s about three sizes too big for him, but that’s neither here nor there. “Oscorp?”

“My dad works there.” This, she thinks, is how it feels to walk into a dragon’s horde and start putting your paws all over its crap. Judged, and rushed out the door. Miles holds the T-shirt like it’s a gold coin, watching her. “What happened to Elena?”

“Last guy who owned this building wasn’t as nice as me.” She shakes her hair out of her face. “And that you can definitely Google.”

“Oh,” says Miles, for the third time. “I mean—okay.”

“Unless you’ve already Googled me,” Kate says, watching him. Miles bites his lip. “Which you totally have. I can see it in your face.”

“I Google everyone.” He ducks his head. “I mean, I didn’t—shit.”

“That’s slightly creepy, Morales.” And he’s awkward and ludicrous and actually weirdly cute in a way and she’s _not going down this path_. She absolutely is not. She’s a mess of feelings and mistakes and she’s really, really not wanting to be paired off with anyone, anyway. She’s not ready for that, she may never be ready for that, she still shoots awake thinking someone’s holding her against damp earth, and Elena needs to _quit doing this_. _Why can’t old people listen when you say no? Why do they have to be so goddamn sure they’re right?_ “You could’ve just asked. Not like I hide any of it.”

Miles looks up, slowly. _Not any of it,_ Kate thinks. She’s never hidden any of it, not who she is, or what’s happened to her, or who she wants to be, but it feels like the whole world thinks she should. Her dad, her sister. Her grandmother, definitely. Yoko, even. _Everyone wants me to hide, but I won’t._ Not who she is, not where she’s from, not what she’s done and what’s been done to her. Not any of it. She’s never once hidden anything, and if you type her name into Google, all of it’s right there in black and white. The one thing she’s ever kept her mouth shut about is her mask, and hell, even then, all she wears are glasses. Anyone could tell, if they looked hard enough.

“I don’t have a reason to hide,” she says, waiting. Miles lets the shirt rest against the couch again, still watching her. He’s the one to look away first, clearing his throat.

“What kind of graffiti?” His voice is very husky, all of a sudden. “I can’t help if I don’t know what I’m looking for.”

“Japanese kanji.”

“I’m taking Japanese.”

“I _am_ Japanese,” she says. “Which may or may not work to your advantage. If you see any kanji, though, gimme a shout.”

His throat works. “I’m—I won’t tell Elena. I don’t want her to get hurt.”

Her tongue’s a husk. “Well,” Kate says. “Good.”

“Kate,” Miles says, as she turns to the door. “I forgot, there’s something else—there were some weird guys in the building today.”

Kate stills. It feels as though static’s crackling up her arms. “Weird? How do you mean weird?”

“I only saw them for a second, I was coming back from work and they were leaving.” He swipes his hand through the air at about his nose-level. “About that tall.  They were in expensive suits, speaking Japanese. One of them was Asian, the other one was black, Jamaican maybe. He had an accent on the _katakana_ English.”

“What were they doing here?”

“I’m only in Japanese 201, I have no idea what they were saying. The vocabulary was way too advanced.” He folds the sleeves over the front of the Oscorp shirt, still fidgety. “I don’t know, they just—they were weird, and they seemed suspicious. They were businessmen or something, I don’t know.”

“You sure you didn’t hear anything?”

“I mean, they said—” Miles’s forehead wrinkles. “I think they said a name, like—Asami or Asano or Ayane or something. And I definitely heard the name Hiroshi, too.”

 _Asano._ Roxxon and Asano and the yakuza, _shit._ “You’re sure?”

“Absolutely sure.”

 _There’s making assumptions, and then there’s making evidentiary judgments. Thanks, Ahagon family._ “I’ll keep an eye on it.”

“I can help,” Miles says. He sets his jaw. “If you want me to.”

 _Save me from do-gooder boys who just want to help._ “I should be good on my own,” she says. “Keep an eye out for more graffiti, all right? And if the Ahagons get up to anything, let me know.” _C’mon, Katie._ “I think you have my number.”

“Kate—” Miles jerks a little, looking away. Kate stops, and cocks an eyebrow at him. “Just be careful, okay? Something’s going on, and it—it could get really bad really fast.”

“I don’t need you telling me to be careful,” she says. “You live with half-finished robots on your living room floor.”

“Just—” Miles swallows again. “I don’t know. I can’t explain why, just—be careful.”

Because _caution and common sense_ is her life motto, definitely. “I can take care of myself, Morales,” Kate says. “I get that you wanna help, but I can handle it. Don’t poke your nose into it any further, all right? It’s my problem, not yours.”

She lets herself out before he can argue. For some reason, her palms are sticky and cold.

.

.

.

_To: questions@theurichreport.com_

_From: mmguerra@freenet.com_

_Subject: Help_

Dear Mr. Urich,

You don’t know me, and you have no reason to trust me, but you’re the only person I can turn to for help. I’ve tried everything I can think of, asked everyone I can, and you’re my last option. Fifteen years ago my father was murdered, and the only people who can help me find out why are Daredevil and Lilith.

Please, I don’t have anywhere else to go. If you can help, please meet me in a café called Mug Shots, at the address linked below. I’ll be there every night this week from six to seven pm, so please, please meet with me. There’s no one else who can help.

Sincerely,

Marisol Guerra

 

_To: mmguerra@freenet.com_

_From: questions@theurichreport.com_

_Subject: re: Help_

Dear Ms. Guerra,

I think you highly underestimate how many emails like this I get per day, if you’re asking about vigilantes. Generally the police are trustworthy enough to handle murders, and I’m not anyone’s link to Daredevil _or_ Lilith, thank you for assuming. My advice is to let the cops do their jobs, and leave the lawbreakers to their own devices.

Cordially,

Ben Urich

 

_To: questions@theurichreport.com_

_From: mmguerra@freenet.com_

_Subject: re: re: Help_

It’s been fifteen years and the cops haven’t done a damn thing worth doing, and if you aren’t as connected to the Devil and the Angel as Nelson, Murdock & Lewis are, then I’m not as smart as I thought I was.

Please. I’ll be at the café tonight. Please come.

\--M

.

.

.

It’s not much of an interview, really. It’s more Frank saying, “So, your firm know who you are, or not,” and Darcy saying, “Does that actually really matter,” and then Frank saying, “Matters if they wind up dead.” Which degenerates into “I’m not going to let any of them get hurt” and “You can’t stop people gettin’ hurt, Cat” and “watch me” and “just making yourself weak by caring so much,” and then Darcy getting pissed because seriously, he’s already held a gun to her head once this month to prove this point, he doesn’t need to make it again. When she slams out of the hospital room to go kick a vending machine, she doesn’t think anyone is particularly surprised.

She’s not sure if she’s relieved when Elektra sends a car around for them, or even more pissed off. Relieved because it means they’re not hanging on tenterhooks any longer when it comes to Elektra Natchios and the fucking yakuza, but she’s also kind of pissed off, because the chauffeur is saying shit like _now_ and _immediately_ and _my employer will be displeased,_ and she hates that they’re leaving Foggy and Karen to deal with Frank Castle when Foggy didn’t want to get into this in the first place. When she says this, though, Foggy waves her off. “Go,” he says. “Deal with her shit and come back. It’s an arraignment, it’ll be over by seven-thirty. Just don’t make a habit out of ditching, even for the yakuza.”

Darcy busses his cheek. “You put up with so much shit.”

“Yeah, you owe me big. For all of it. Eight whole years of shit. First the pining, now the ditching—”

“Fuck off, Foggy.” Darcy pinches his ribs. “I owe you forever. And we’ll make it up.”

“Do my homework for a year,” he says, and she knows she’s forgiven. She knocks her fist to his chest, barely a tap.   

“Yeah, whatever, bro.”

Karen’s phone rings, and down the hall, the nurse gives her an absolutely filthy look. She silences it. Matt cocks an eyebrow, though, and Karen’s throat gets a bit pink. “It’s nothing. It’s just Ben, I’ll call him back after we’re done.”

“You sure?” Darcy loops her hand through Matt’s. “You could walk out with us.”

Karen’s eyes dart to Matt, and then back to Darcy. “I should help Foggy. If you guys are going. Besides, it’s probably about something I forgot the last time I went to see him, he never calls if it’s important. He texts, usually.”

“If you say so.”

The chauffeur has feet like an elephant, all huge and silent. He creeps out of the corner. “My employer—”

“We get it,” Darcy snaps at the chauffeur. “Go sit in the car.”

The chauffeur goes to sit in the car. Or stand in the lobby or something, who knows. Either way, he fucks off, and the hallway feels cleaner again. She thinks Foggy might be trying really hard not to laugh.

“Be nice to the guy,” he says. “He’s working.”

“I’ll apologize later.” Not through tipping. Buying a coffee, maybe. She can afford a coffee, at least. Darcy squeezes Karen’s elbow, hooks her arm through Matt’s. “Call if anything happens, okay?”

“Yeah.” Karen kisses her cheek. “Of course.”

“Don’t get turned into flying monkeys,” Foggy says, but he’s already sorting through papers again. “I can’t work with flying monkeys, there won’t be enough desk space.”

“Whatever, bro.”

Matt’s at her shoulder, tight-mouthed and bristly. At least, she thinks, he waits until they get into the elevator. As soon as the doors slide shut, he says, “Jen—”

“Don’t.”

He shifts his hand on her elbow. “I wasn’t going to—”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Darcy—”

“You know how I feel about lying to Jen, Matt, I don’t—”

“I wasn’t going to tell you to lie to her.”

Darcy shuts her mouth. “Oh.”

Matt presses his thumb into the seam of her elbow. Above the doors, lights flicker through numbers, the elevator creaking its way down to the ground. “The more people who know, the more dangerous it gets.”

“I know.” There’s a pinging, a creak, and the elevator slows. _Second floor._ “I just—need to think. Later.”

“Later,” Matt says, and then they’re squashed into a corner when a bunch of medical students all fold themselves into the elevator too. Darcy shuts her eyes, leans her head into his chest, and breathes.

The limo on the corner is scary shiny, long and black like the shell of a scorpion. Darcy pretends very hard not to notice the way that the ER nurses are watching them as she slips into the back, sliding into the far side of the cab with her briefcase on her knees. It’s an odd echo of the café, Matt sliding in after her and knocking into her, already corded with tension. _This is not a flashback I like._ Shoot to Thrill by AC/DC is echoing from somewhere under Elektra’s seat.

“About time the pair of you showed up,” she says. “There’s only so much attention one can attract without it becoming interminably boring.”

“You’re the one who brought the limo.” There’s a volume dial on the side of the car. She turns the music down. _I’m as much of an AC/DC fan as the next girl, but I’d rather not have to shout over it._ “You look—”

Elektra bares her teeth. “Lovely?”

Dark. Slinky. Sexy. Terrifying. Her dress is the color of blood, and her mouth is a mauling waiting to happen. “Ready to rip someone’s throat out.”

“That’s the same thing,” she says. “Matthew.”

“Elektra.” Matt folds up his cane. “You can’t send a car like this when you—”

“Please, it meets the requisite level of flash and glitter we’ll be needing. Besides, the invitations say seven sharp, and I’d rather not be late.”

“Seven for _what_ ,” Matt snaps, and she’s tempted to get _rule number two: no sniping_ tattooed on everyone’s forehead. Darcy pretends not to pay attention to it, plays with the volume dial, and then shuffles forward through the mix. The sound system is on a Bluetooth setup, which means either Elektra’s a classic rock fan, or this limo’s owned by some very interesting people. She hasn’t heard The Sex Bob-ombs in ages.

“We were working,” Darcy says. “Just so you know.”

“Yes, the Twitterverse was all—well, atwitter.”

“You’re on Twitter?”

“I track a few tags.” Elektra crosses her legs at the knee. “And as fascinating as I’m sure picking the mind of a mass murderer must be—”

“You’re one to talk.”

“—we _do_ actually have a schedule.” She doesn’t say _schedule_ , she says _shedule,_ the way an English person does. For some reason, that sticks out in Darcy’s brain. “Like I said. Stan Gibson won’t pickpocket himself.”

“Stan who?”

“Asano’s accountant.” Elektra rolls her eyes up to the ceiling, the picture of a queen whose life has not gone according to plan. “Keep up. If we want to know what the yakuza are doing here in the city, then we need their book of records, and to get to the book—which, no, is not hackable, it’s a physical tome— we need a keycard into the locked levels of the Yakatomi Building, which Stan the Man seems to carry with him. I _did_ explain it.”

“Stan the Man?”

Matt waves that off. “So, what, the plan is all three of us pickpocket one guy?”

“Well, I did bring clothes in case you wanted to play it that way, but there’s actually something both of you can do.” Elektra leans back into the cushion of the limo, and draws a manila file out from underneath her ass. “There were only two tickets into the event, one of them in my name, but I’ve been making inquiries. Apparently, Asano as a corporation has been poking its nose into a few properties in Hell’s Kitchen.”

“Yeah, well,” Matt says. “There are a lot standing on the market.”

“They’re trying to be subtle about it this time.” She pages through the file. “And by a few I mean one. Specifically, this one.”

There are old photos, and an address, and a new snapshot that looks like it’s just been printed, post-Kate’s clean-up, post the new paint on the front door and the cleaned stoop. Darcy wants to spit. “Shit.”

“What?” says Matt, as she takes the file from Elektra—Elektra doesn’t fight, which is _weird—_ and starts flicking through the papers. “Darcy.”

“It’s Elena’s tenement,” Darcy says. 

“Elena?” Elektra’s eyes dart from one of them to the other. “Who’s Elena?”

Matt hisses through his teeth. “Last year Fisk was trying to strong-arm the tenants out of it on behalf of a man named Armand Tully. Elena’s building was one of them.”

“That much I gathered from the newspapers,” Elektra snaps. “Who’s Elena?”

“No one,” Darcy says. “To you.”

“The client,” Matt says. “Who’s also not a part of any of this.”

Elektra sighs. “The pair of you and your soft hearts.”

“I don’t need to hear that from you,” Matt says, and Darcy presses her knee into his without thinking about it. This time, though, there’s no table to hide behind. Elektra stares at them both, long and hard, before turning to look out the window.

“I mean, it’s not as though we didn’t have some idea the yakuza were interested in the building.” Darcy brushes her fingers over the photo. “After the graffiti popped up.”

Elektra’s ears prick. “What graffiti?”

“Kanji painted in the building. We couldn’t track down who painted it, so we were keeping an eye on it, but this is—” _a million kinds of not okay._ “I know the person who owns it. They wouldn’t be interested in selling, not to anyone. Especially not to Roxxon.”

“You’d better hope Kate Bishop—” her mouth arches, as if to say, _dare you to contradict me_ “—clings on with all her teeth, then, because people who go up against Asano tend to come away with no jaw.”

 _Shit._ “You think they’re going to try to harass her into selling?”

“I think they’re going to try and kill her,” Elektra says, “and buy the building out from whoever she’s willed it to, if she’s even willed it to anybody.”

And there’s her heart, crashing right into overdrive, beating in her head like a hummingbird. _Kate. Kate._ “She has a will,” Darcy says. “I helped her write it. The building goes to a friend of hers, if—if anything happens to her.”

“And can this friend take care of herself?”

“Himself.” _He’s an Avenger, so if anyone can take care of themselves if the yakuza come calling, it’s Clint Barton._ “And he wouldn’t sell. But it’s not going to come to that.”

“Oh?” Elektra looks at her, sidelong. “Are you so sure?”

“They touch Kate,” Darcy says, “and I rip their hands off.”

“I’d wondered if that might not be the case, after reading about the suit against the Goodmans.” Elektra’s mouth curls up again, into the wildcat smile. “You might want to think about having so many personal ties, Lilith. I’m afraid it’s not healthy in this line of work.”

 _First Frank, now you, Jesus._ And even before that, Matt, and Stick, and all that bullshit about going it alone. She will scream it from the rooftops, really, to all of them. _Being alone doesn’t solve any problems._ It never has and never will. All it does is trick you into thinking things will be easier. “They don’t seem to be doing anything bad to me yet,” Darcy says, and goes through a few more pages of the file. Elektra’s done her research: here’s TMZ, and a snapshot of Foggy and Kate on TV with that interview, and another article talking about the close of the Goodman case, and…yeah, okay. Nothing about Kate as Hawkeye, or about Hawkeye at all. Cool. That, at least, is still safe. “So one of us goes with you, one of us goes to the tenement.”

“You already seem to have a rapport with the people there.” Elektra shrugs. “We could switch around, if you like, you come in with me while Matthew wanders back to the Kitchen. Could be interesting to see how the Roxxon elite reacts to you as my date.”

She’s not sure if Matt just choked on his own tongue or if he’s trying very hard not to shout, but either way he makes a very odd noise. Which, she suppose, was the point. She’s pretty sure everything Elektra’s done so far with the sniping and the weird flirting and the sass has been to piss Matt off, and this is no different. “Maybe another time.”

“Your loss,” says Elektra. “You have a lovely dress.”

“You actually brought me a dress?”

“I had to guess for your measurements, but I think I came close.” She peeks through her eyelashes again. “We’re about the same height. It helps.”

“Sure.” That explains the second clothing bag, draped over the seat next to her. “Somehow I don’t—think that’s quite the impact you want to make. Coming in with me. If the party’s a bunch of old guys with big wallets and corporations under their toes.”

“It’d be fun, though, you can’t deny that.” Elektra hooks her ankles together. “Matthew?”

“I’ll do it.” He pushes his glasses up his nose. “Two tickets, two people. They’ll be expecting someone.”

Darcy bites the inside of her cheek. If he thinks he can, then…fuck. She’s not sure he actually thinks he can. He might just be weighing the options and picking the one that has the least amount of shit that could go wrong. It sounds like something Matt would do. _And I can’t call him on that in front of Elektra because that would_ not _end well._ “So. You two go in, get this book of records, come back out. And I go to Elena’s and nose around.”

“That was the thought,” says Elektra, as Matt yanks off his tie, and starts undoing the buttons on his shirt. _Up the ante for weirdest thing ever: have your boyfriend strip in front of both you and his ex on the way to a fancy party without anyone batting an eyelash._ “Though if you want to get saucy about it you could always go after the men who were peeking into forbidden servers in the first place. I don’t know how you’d track them down without me, but—”

“I’ll manage something.” Darcy taps the paper. “The guy who’s been making inquiries, Hirochi—he’s going to be at this party, right?”

“He should be, considering he’s the one who invited me to discuss my involvement with Asano.”

Matt emerges from his shirt, his hair sticking up everywhere, bruising raw on his bare arms. He pulls on the dress shirt, and starts doing up the buttons. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking that if Hirochi’s affiliated with the yakuza that there has to be proof of that somewhere, and that it’s probably a fake name.” She blows out air. “The last yakuza guy we ran into, Nobu, he had a million fake names. So it’s more than likely—”

“Nobu?” Elektra says, and snaps to attention. “Nobu—not Nobu Yoshioka.”

“Hironobu Orihara,” says Darcy. “Among other names.”

“Yoshioka.” Elektra’s _sizzling_. She’s sitting there with energy rattling off her, not fear, exactly, but…awareness, more like. A cat with its hair standing on end. “Hirochi comes from the same family.”

“The Oriharas?”

“The Orihara are a subsidiary of the Yoshioka, a sworn family, almost. Independent but encompassed by the Yoshioka.” She pinches her lip. “You met Nobu?”

Darcy makes herself smile, and it hurts, to do it, it really does. She waggles her left hand at Elektra, flickering her fingers, the bones that still ache and the scar and the uneven weight of her wrist. “Yeah, we met.”

She doesn’t process the movement—Elektra reaching out with one hand, long-fingered and callused—until Matt snatches Elektra’s wrist. There’s a weird, angular second where Elektra’s reaching for Darcy, and Darcy’s hand’s up, and Matt’s clenched his fingers tight enough around Elektra’s wrist that his knuckles are pale through his skin. Nobody moves. Nobody _breathes_ , it seems like. It might actually turn into a fight, here, in the back of a limo, with Elektra reaching out and Matt squeezing her arm so tight it’s probably going to leave a mark.

“What,” Elektra says, silky. “Don’t get to touch?”

There’s a muscle jumping in his throat. “Matt,” Darcy says, but he doesn’t let go.

“How do you know Nobu?”

“I’ve researched the yakuza for months.” Elektra shakes her hair back. “Of course I’ve heard of Nobu Yoshioka.” She cuts a look at Darcy under her lashes. “If I bruise, people will talk.”

She thinks he might dig in with his fingernails, just for spite, before letting go, and _Christ,_ when Matt drop into the Devil? “Ask,” he says. “Don’t grab.”

“If you do that again,” Elektra replies, “I’ll break your wrist.”

Fucking hell. _Say something, Darcy, defuse it,_ but she can’t speak. Her mouth is too dry. Matt’s eyebrows squeeze together. He wets his lips. “You can try.”

It’s very, very faint, but she thinks Elektra’s smiling. There are too many shadows and flickering streetlamps for her to tell. There are marks on her wrist, and it’s darkening fast. Deliberately, she looks to Darcy, and says, “How many fingers did he break?”

 _Most of them_ , is the answer. Darcy flexes her hand, and then offers it, letting it hang in the air. “See for yourself.”

Matt twitches, next to her, but he doesn’t stop it this time. Elektra’s careful when she cups Darcy’s wrist, turns her hand palm up and studying it, the skin and bones and flexibility of her fingers. She’s moving like the mark from the blade is an archeological find, like she has a shard of ancient Greek pottery jammed beneath her skin. There are calluses on her hand, and her fingers are terrifyingly strong, for how slender they are. She looks up at Darcy again with the oddest sort of expression, half-lit from the streetlights outside. Not surprised, she doesn’t think. Not confused, either. More considering. “This was a knife?”

“Mm.”

“What kind?”

“I dunno. The stabby kind.” There’s a cactus in her throat, right now. It’s very uncomfortable. “He had me tied up at the time, so I wasn’t paying too much attention.”

Elektra snaps another look at her, but her face is blank, this time. Shielded. Her eyes narrow. She draws her fingertips down the scar, and then lets go. Next to her, Matt bumps into Darcy with his knee, and draws away again. She’s not sure if Elektra notices this time, but it helps steady her out, at least. “Lucky. He could have killed you.”

“Pretty sure he was going to.” Darcy rubs at the scar with her thumb. “That’s not the point. Hirochi’s not the guy’s real name, that much I’m certain of. A nickname, or something. If the yakuza are moving again, then tracking down more names for him might be the best move we have.”

“Seems roundabout.”

“More roundabout than stealing their record books out from under their noses?” Matt says, and Elektra purses her lips and shrugs.

“Mine at least doesn’t draw as much attention to your _secret identities_.” She wrinkles her nose. “Is that what you call them? It seems absurd.”

“No,” Matt says. “It isn’t.”

“We call it Chinatown, actually,” says Darcy. “As problematic as it is. And yeah, it’s roundabout, but the scumbags here are used to us being battering rams. If I wander around asking questions in a very angry tone, that’s something they’ll expect. Not to mention the fact that it might draw their attention away from you guys and your _Mr. and Mrs. Smith_ dealio.” Which does not make her throat close up, because she’s—not comfortable with this, but she trusts what Matt said about not wanting to start anything, goddammit. She _does_. “If I’m heading back to the tenement, can we get Jeeves to take me home before we leave the Kitchen? I need to get my shit together. Call a friend.” 

Elektra’s lips peel back from her teeth. “Bringing someone else in?”

“She’s already involved in everything else we do. She’s trustworthy, and she’s good, and I’m not going against another high-ranking Orihara—Yoshioka, sorry. Another high-ranking Yoshioka without back-up. The last one was bad enough.”

“Ah,” Elektra says. “Your bird. I’d been wondering when she was going to show up.”

 _Don’t have to sound so condescending._ “Don’t worry,” Darcy says. “You don’t have to deal with her.”

“Shame. I’d like to meet Hawkeye, I think.”

“I’d pay to see that,” Matt says. “I really would.”

Things that Kate Bishop would have no patience for: Any of Elektra’s bullshit. Kate gets pissy whenever anyone other than her gives Matt or Darcy crap, and throwing her into a room with Elektra Natchios would end in blood. “You can drop me here,” Darcy says, when she peeks out the window and sees the very edge of Hell’s Kitchen. “I can—I’ll walk. It’s okay.”

“If you’re sure,” Elektra says.

“I’m sure.”

“You can keep the dress if you like.” She flicks a hand, her fingernails dark as bruises. “It won’t fit me. Besides, you never know, you may need it.”

“I think I’m good.”

“Take it anyway,” Elektra says. “I have no use for it and it’ll be thrown away if you don’t.”

“Fine.” She’d never known it could actually _hurt_ to say things, deep in her chest, under her ribs, scraping her tongue. Well, not until all of this had started. At Elektra’s signal—and she must have punched a button or done _something_ , even if Darcy hadn’t noticed—the limousine pulls over, and purrs to a stop. “Matt, scooch, you’re in the way.”

Matt’s mouth twists. Still, he opens the door of the limo. He could, she thinks, just let her slide past—the cab’s big enough—but instead he clambers out, too, half in the fancy clothes, half in his lawyer suit, mixed in disguises. He shuts the door of the limo, and shifts until he’s in what must be Elektra’s line of sight, putting his back to the window. His lips have thinned out to nothing, something twining tight in the set of his shoulders.

“You okay?” Darcy says, and he reaches out and hooks his fingers through hers.

“She’s baiting you.”

“Yeah, I gathered that. With the tux and the dress and the two tickets thing. That’s not what I asked.”

Somehow, his mouth gets even thinner. She’s pretty sure they’re in negative decimals here. “I’m—”

“Don’t say you’re fine.”

“—not happy,” he says. “I’m not happy.”

“Picked that up from the whole grabby thing.” _If Matt registers Elektra as enough of a threat to nearly snap her wrist before she can put a hand on me, I…don’t know how well this infiltration thing is going to work out._ She fusses with the dress bag. “If you’re going to spend all your time watching and waiting for her to jump you with a knife, Asano will pick you guys out as plants in like…five seconds.”

“I’m not the one she might be interested in hurting.”

 _I can protect myself._ Though that might not be the issue here. This isn’t _Darcy is vulnerable,_ she thinks—this is _Elektra is dangerous._ “You heard what she said in the café. She needs us to do this properly. She’s not going to attack her own back-up, no matter what she’s done in the past. And honestly, I really doubt that she’d come after me, even if we weren’t working with her. Doesn’t seem like her style.”

The look on Matt’s face says just what he thinks of _that_ idea.

“She’s not going to touch me,” Darcy says. “I won’t let her. Besides, I’m going to be checking on Elena’s with Kate, which I know is half the reason you jumped on the shmancy party grenade.”

Some of the tension leaks out of his shoulders. “It makes logistical sense.”

“If we’re all going to be working together, you can’t keep us in separate rooms forever.” His tie is crooked. Darcy hands him the bag with the dress in it, and reaches up to fix the knot, shift the thing until it’s centered properly. “If she gets weird, I can deal with it.”

“I don’t want you to have to.”

“Yeah, well, we’re stuck with it at the moment.” She sighs. “I am deeply displeased with all the blindsiding that’s going on right now.”

“Mm.” AC/DC starts up again inside the limo, loud and pointed, and Matt grimaces. “Great.”

“You think she’ll turn it down?’

“Probably,” he says. “She’s trying to make you angry.”

“Yeah, I think I picked up on that.” Darcy pulls on the tie again, trying to fix it. It won’t settle right. “I don’t remember her being this…I dunno. She asked us for help. Seems weird that she’s trying to get me angry the whole time.”

Or not weird, she thinks, looking up at his face. Not really weird at all. Just…frustrating. Matt folds the dress over his arm and clasps her hands with both of his, holding them to his chest, tracing his thumb down her fingers in an absentminded sort of way. “Sorry.”

“Her behavior isn’t something you need to apologize for.” She wrinkles her nose. “Just—don’t react. It really doesn’t help.”

“Trying.”

“I know.” Darcy scrapes a nail over his collarbone. “Really not happy someone’s looking to kill Kate.”

“Neither am I.” He blows out air, all whale. “Whatever the yakuza want this building for, we can’t let them get it. Legally or illegally.”

“Hopefully there’ll be something in that book she’s looking for that’ll give us a clue why.” Darcy sighs. “If you’re not okay doing this, Matt, I can pretend to be Elektra’s date. That’s totally okay. It’ll be interesting, for sure, and I might end up tossing a drink in someone’s face before the end of it, but I can do it.”

He squeezes her fingers, shifts her hands off. “I’m fine.”

“Matt,” Darcy says, and he stops. “You’re really okay?”

Matt’s quiet. He lifts one shoulder, lets it drop. “I’m going to have to be, aren’t I?”

 _Deep breath, Lewis._ Darcy lifts her hands, cups them to the back of his neck, and just looks at him for a little while, scratching into his hair. Matt heaves a sigh, and bends, ducking his head until they’re in the same space, until when he breathes out it tickles at her nose.

“If you need me there,” she says, “you call me.”

His mouth curves up. Matt tips her chin up, and kisses her, once, twice, lingering. When her hand slips down, settles over his heart, it’s beating a little too fast. This time, she thinks, Elektra is watching, and she can’t quite bring herself to care.

“Same for you,” he says, lips still catching on hers. Darcy goes up onto her toes, more to breathe him than anything. “Call if something happens.”

“Okay.” Her lungs ache. “I love you.”

Matt tucks her hair behind her ears, brushes his mouth over hers. “I love you,” he says. “Please be safe.”

“When am I not safe?”

His lips curve up, tickling. “Don’t make me answer that. I have a list.”

“Asshole.” She pushes at his shoulders, fingers curled into his shirt. “Go.”

“Going.” Another kiss, coffee on her tongue, and then he’s slipped back into the limousine. She’s alone on the street with the bag with no label as the car pulls away from the curb. This ought to be a black-and-white movie, she thinks. Matt and Elektra in an expensive car driving away all over again, all old memories.

_Hello, Darcy, dear. I’m here to abduct him for a bit._

For a second, a terrible, shameful second, she’s swamped. Not panic, exactly. Not worry. Biting concern and smoky fear and bad, bad memories. “Fuck.” Darcy rubs her eyes. “Fucking hell.” _Come on, Darcy._ It’s only a few hours. Nothing too bad can happen in a few hours.

….nothing _too_ bad.

She taps her phone, hits speed dial. The unmarked bag is still draped over her arm, dark and unassuming. When she unzips the top, peeks, her chest hurts. It’s a gorgeous dress, slinky and short, dark with red highlights. And it would fit her, she’s pretty sure. Elektra hadn’t been bullshitting. Unless there are hidden pins in it somewhere, or—who knows. Poisoned seams. Possibly bad stitching so it’ll come apart at a moment’s notice. No, that’s petty. But _come on_.     

_Christ, this is so fucking weird._

“’sup,” Kate says over speakerphone. Darcy taps it into private mode, and nestles the phone to her ear. “Can we go out tonight? I need to shoot things. Like a lot of things.”

“Actually, I have a job we can do,” she says. “Can you meet me at Elena’s?”

Kate’s quiet for a second. “Elena’s?”

“Yeah, the tenement.”

“Why?”

 _Why?_ Since when does Kate ask why if it means shooting things? “Yakuza. Specifically the Oriharas. Or the Yoshioka, according to Elektra. They’re sniffing around.”

“Oh.” She lets out a breath. “Cool, yeah. Can do. I was gonna talk to you about that, actually. There are guys in suits speaking Japanese wandering around my building. According to eyewitnesses.”

“Apparently,” Darcy says, “there are yakuza who want you dead.”

“So what else is new,” Kate replies, and hangs up the phone.


	11. The Tricky Thing With Rocks And Hard Places

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, first off: smut in this chapter. Just FYI. It's at the very end, so if it's not to your taste, just ollie out when they start kissing like losers. 
> 
> Content warning: blood, knives, PTSD issues, probably grammatically problematic Japanese, some language that might be offensive (in Japanese, _haafu_ is the culturally acceptable if chock-full of issues term for people who are half-Japanese, half-take-your-pick; it's not viewed as a negative word, but just so y'all are aware that's a thing that comes up here, because there are a lot of people who, for rightful reasons, would have problems with it), and more arguments. 
> 
> This chapter. Took. Forever. Sweet Jesus Christ. I'm still not entirely happy with it. But. Y'all owe extasiswings so much love and fic and a metric fuckton of cookies for dragging me up out of "god, I can't write, I can't write" hell and helping me fix as much as I have. 
> 
> (Thank you again, Chapel, so much.) 
> 
> Japanese translation at the bottom!

“So,” he says. “How much of that was orchestrated?”

Deliberately, Elektra checks her mascara in a pocket mirror. “How much of what?”

“Don’t fuck around, Elektra,” he says, and he must be angry, if he’s swearing like that. “We both know exactly what you’re trying to do.”

“And what’s that, go up against the yakuza?” She’s tempted, for a moment, to fuss with her lipstick, but that might be too much like hitting a hornet’s nest with a baseball bat. Elektra snaps the mirror shut. “I thought that much was obvious.”

“Christ,” says Matthew. “Do you have any idea how infuriating you are?”

“I can guess.” Elektra picks at a cuticle. “Besides, you’re giving yourself far too much credit, if you’re thinking that all I’ve done the past few weeks has been purely to irritate you. Though I have to say, you never used to be this easy to piss off.”

Matthew scoffs, and goes back to changing. Every movement is jerky, uncomfortable. He really, she thinks, does not want to be here. “For someone who came to us for help, you’re spending a hell of a lot of time trying to get us to back away.”

“Is that what I’m doing?”

“I don’t have another word for it.”

Frankly, neither does she. _I told you,_ she thinks, not at herself but at Stick. _I told you, I don’t need their help._ Having it, knowing there are other people looking into this, and maybe— _maybe, maybe—_ drawing Matthew, at least, into the fight: that’s positive, that’s sensical, that’s necessary, in some ways, because she can’t take on the whole of the Hand alone. But it’s still sandpaper on her tongue, rubbing her insides raw. “You needn’t be so sensitive. She’s not bothered by it, why should you be?”

“Because I know better than to trust you. You always have a game.”

“Of course,” she says, to cover the sting. “Games are what makes life interesting.”

Matthew may be blind, but he’s very, very good at rolling his eyes. She’s never seen such a powerful _Christ, save me_ than that. “What’s the point of flirting with her?”

“Am I?”

“Cut the bullshit.”

“Don’t go entirely Cro-Magnon, Matthew. I flirt with everyone. It’s not directed anywhere in particular.”

Even Matthew Murdock, defense attorney, can’t come up with a way to argue with that. He shuts his mouth for a second, regroups. "You think the Yoshioka are still interested in her. Why?”

She hums. “Do I?”

“Unless there was some other reason for you to be so focused on that scar.”

 _Yoshioka Nobu doesn’t leave people alive._ She doesn’t know the context of the knife wound, doesn’t know why the blade wasn’t poisoned, doesn’t know why a man like Nobu would be so careful to plunge the blade between every tendon, leave a whole hand behind. There would be stiffness, she thinks, where the finger bones were snapped, maybe it aches in the cold, but for the most part, Darcy Lewis still has two working hands. Yoshioka Nobu is known for his practicality as well as he’s known for his brutality. Either he hadn’t regarded Lilith as enough of a threat to disarm her—which is possible, considering what she remembers of The Lewis Before, all beanies and snark and cartoon T-shirts—or he had been waiting for something in particular before finishing his work. Knowing what she knows about Nobu, it could have gone either way.

“How did she get it?” Elektra says. “The mark.”

Matthew doesn’t reply. He shifts around until the shirt’s tucked in properly, starts fumbling with the tie. Not undoing it, just…fidgeting with it. It’s a nervous habit she doesn’t remember. “The thing about you not being a part of my life anymore,” he says, “is that you’re not a part of my life anymore. Besides, Nobu’s dead.”

“Did you kill him?”

“He burned,” Matthew says, which is and isn’t an answer, really. “I heard his heart stop beating.”

 _Yoshioka Nobu,_ Stick says in the back of her head, _has lived three lifetimes, and the fucker might live another three if we’re not goddamn careful, Ellie._ “If Lilith’s personally offended the yakuza, it may affect the investigation. Don’t be childish, Matthew.”

“I wonder sometimes if you realize how hypocritical some things are coming out of your mouth,” he says, and she almost hisses. A million things have happened in the past four years, hundreds of sunrises and sunsets, and three minutes alone with Matthew Murdock turns her into a reckless twenty-three year old idiot with a mouth like a high school freshman. _Children,_ Lilith had said, and in a strange, twisted, awful way she’s right—her emotions roar out of her control, here. With him, she’s all bruises and raw skin, she can’t help it, and that is, in and of itself, very much the way a child is. She _hates_ what he does to her.

“Why did Nobu Yoshioka put a knife in Lilith’s hand?”

Matthew tugs at the tie again. “Lilith didn’t exist when that happened.”

And that’s a tone she remembers. That’s the voice she’s only ever heard a few times, from him. In Fogwell’s Gym. Alone in empty houses. _My father was murdered._ Eggshell grief, loathing coiling in the dark. “They took her,” Elektra says, “to get at you,” and the angle to his mouth tells her _yes, yes, yes._ “And you still let her come out with you at night?”

“I don’t _let_ her do anything,” Matthew says. “I never have.”

His mouth quirks in a way that’s fond, and tender, and quiet, and not directed at her, and Elektra turns away before it can get to her. “At least you have some common sense. I’d begun to wonder if all of it had been driven out of your skull with a hammer.”

“Wasn’t that what you wanted?”

“Don’t bring this up again.” She snaps the mirror back open. “I’m very tired of this conversation.”

“Of course you are.”

And that, right there—that is _it._ “You know,” Elektra snaps, “for someone who’s so quick to call _me_ immature, you’re doing a damn good job of acting that way yourself.”

Her phone buzzes before he can reply. _Think of the devil, and he shall appear,_ and Stick must have had one of his many little minions type out a message for him, because the text reads, _confirm when you have the package, don’t be stupid_ in the code they’ve used since she was twelve years old. She doesn’t bother to respond. _That’s obvious, Stick. Work before pleasure._ And there’s no pleasure at all, in this.

“Nobu was—working with Wilson Fisk.” The words chip out of him, flakes of shale, all cutting edges. “Fisk wanted her because of me, to draw me out. Nobu wanted to ask her a question.”

“What question?”

“About something called the Black Sky,” Matthew says.

 _Do not move. Do not speak. Do not breathe._ She measures her heartbeats, keeps them steady. Elektra doesn’t flinch. “Did she know anything?”

“No.” She’d have been able to get away with it if it had been anyone else on the planet (aside, maybe, from Stick) but he’s too good at this. Some little microexpression must have given her away. Matthew’s eyebrows creep up his forehead. “What do you know about the Black Sky, Elektra?”

 _It brings the end of all things,_ she thinks. _It gives the Hand ultimate power and destroys all that is left in the world. Other than that?_ She could stand right in front of the Black Sky and not know it for what it was. The Chaste have never been particularly clear about what it’s comprised of, just that it needs to be destroyed. “That Nobu wanted it,” Elektra says. “Quite badly, according to rumors. If he thought she could lead him to whatever the Black Sky is, then that would explain why he left her with both hands.”

Of course that distracts him. Matthew’s mouth folds into a threat. “They were bringing something in last year, the yakuza. The Black Sky. But there was nothing more in the shipping crate than a child.”

That she hadn’t heard about. Elektra folds her hands on her lap, wondering. _The kid must have been bearing it, or carrying it, or smuggling it. Someone in the Chaste must have dealt with it._ If the Hand had managed to get their fingers around a Black Sky they would never have let go, and there would be no stopping them, not really. “What happened to the child?”

“He died,” Matthew says flatly.

“If that’s the case, then why—”

“She was looking into the yakuza. About something different, but it snagged Nobu’s interest. He thought she knew more than she did.” Matthew turns the bundle of his cane between his hands. “He did more than break her fingers.”

That starts, she thinks, to explain the difference. When she thinks of Darcy Lewis, she thinks of a student in a beanie, of a girl in the light, absurd, naïve, irrelevant. Not the woman who just left the limousine. Certainly not Lilith. _A pain in the ass,_ Stick had said, _not an actual problem,_ but she thinks of what’s happened, of the apartment and the café and even now, where Lilith had said _Matt_ and meant _stop_ and Matthew snapped to listen, the way he listens to very few.

 _They touch Kate,_ she’d said, _and I rip their hands off._

_Fool me once._

“Where is she learning to fight?” Elektra says, and Matthew (who’s still fussing with the bow tie) stops. He turns his face to her. “She didn’t know, before, and from the footage I’ve seen online she must have learned somewhere.”

She can guess, though. She knows some of those moves. She’d learned them from Stick.

“Me,” Matthew says. “Mostly.”

“Mostly?” Matthew, she thinks, favors boxing, Muay Thai. She’s not entirely sure he knows that, but he does. Lilith is different. She backs away from bigger opponents, darts around them, doesn’t come at them head on. Instinctive, probably. The two styles don’t mesh quite right. It’s not that her weight is off or that she’s out of balance or that she can’t manage it, what she’s learning, it just—doesn’t flow properly. She doesn’t know how else to explain it. Elektra picks at the edges of her nail polish, counting the flash of the streetlights outside. _One, two, three, four, five._ “Who else is she working with?”

“You should ask her.”

“Would you let me?” Up in the front, the chauffer turns on his own sound system. Pendulum creeps through the cracks. “Considering I can’t even ask her about the yakuza without you trying to break my wrist into pieces.”

He has the grace to look a bit ashamed of that, at least, even if he doesn’t know how much it shows on his face. Her wrist is still sore, though, so she doesn’t particularly care. Matthew shifts his glasses on his nose. “You were watching footage of us?”

“Online,” Elektra says. Her tongue prickles, dry. “It’s not as though the pair of you aren’t plastered all over the internet. You have quite the following.”

“Oh.”

Twelve streetlights, thirteen, seventeen, twenty-three. Elektra’s about ready to turn the damn music back on (it’ll kill the horror of the silence) when he says, “She’s the one who suggested I go to Roxxon.”

There’s something swelling up her throat. She’s not sure if it’s her lungs or a disease. “I don’t really care.”

“You should.” He purses his lips, and there’s that awful condescending look she hates. “Considering Darcy keeps on insisting we help you.”

“Are you saying you wouldn’t have?”

“I don’t think it matters whether I would or wouldn’t have done,” he says, another answer all on its own. “Darcy wants to help you. She wouldn’t be involved in this, otherwise.” He stops, musing, face turned towards the window again. “In spite of everything, she still wants to help.”

Her heart jumps, and she can’t stop it before he notices. Elektra’s not sure it matters anymore. “In spite of everything?”

“I told her,” Matthew says. “About Sweeney. And about—about the house.”

That’s—no. Unexpected. Insane. Since when does Matthew _tell_ people things? Since when does Matthew work with anyone? Since when does he have a partner? Since when has he ever been willing to trust anyone enough to let them see into the dark? _Since when does he listen to someone other than me?_ “All of it?”

“I don’t lie to her.”

“Anymore,” Elektra says, because she has to say it, for some reason. Light plays around the lenses of his glasses. “You don’t lie to her _anymore._ ”

He should rage at her for that, yell, lunge, but he doesn’t. “No, not anymore.”

 _When?_ When did he tell her about the house? Any of it? Years ago, days? Why is he throwing this in her face? She’s all carnage, trenches and shelling and cities razed and burned inside her lungs. “As fascinating as this is,” Elektra says, “I really don’t see how it’s relevant.”

“I told her about all of it.” He folds his hands up on his knees. “And she still wants to help. It says a lot. About all of us.”

He’s being so disgustingly _earnest_. She wants to scratch the flesh from her hands. “I don’t remember her being that kind.”

“Not all of it’s kindness.”

“At least she has some sense,” Elektra says. “Nobody’s that much of a saint.”

“She’s helping because this needs to be done.” Matthew pushes his glasses back up his nose. “Even though it’s—complicated.”

“Even though I’m the ex-girlfriend, you mean,” says Elektra. “Well, at least she’s not naïve about the whole thing. I’d been wondering.”

His jaw goes tight. “If she gets hurt at all because of this,” he says, “if something happens to her because she was trying to help you, Elektra, then I promise you that you’ll regret it.”

She rests the tip of her tongue against the back of her teeth, just for a moment. “Oh, Matthew. Are you going to try and kill me?”

“Don’t make me answer that question.”

She can’t help it. Her heart skips and jumps, just a bit. “Well, that’s a change of tune.”

“We both know I wouldn’t kill you.”

“Couldn’t.”

“Wouldn’t,” he says, the puffed-up bastard. “But you’d wish you never came back to New York.”

“Please.”

Matthew shifts his tie one last time. “After this is done, after the Yoshioka are finished, you go, Elektra. You go, and you don’t come back. Is that clear?”

She thinks of the way he’d shut the door of the limousine to see Lilith off on her side-quest, the shadows playing over the glass. She’s not sure if they meant it to be a show, or not. Lilith hadn’t struck her as the type to play that kind of game— _never figured you’d be the one to pull the passive-aggressive ex-girlfriend crap,_ and she’d sounded genuinely disappointed, like Elektra had failed some kind of test—which means (and this is worse, in a way) that it had been completely unconscious. The easiness between them. He’d reached out to her like it was nothing, automatic, not in greed but in an absentminded kind of necessity. There’s cholla in her skin, and she can’t get it free. _I’m over this,_ she tells herself. _I did love you, but that’s gone now, it’s ended,_ but it still aches, seeing this. When she dissects it, it isn’t hard to figure out why. More than any of the rest of it, more than the sting of the past, there’s the transformation. Lilith and Daredevil have run together for almost a full year, have fought and bled and triumphed together for almost a full year, and that’s something she doesn’t know, has no context for. Lilith has a hand on a piece of Matthew that had only ever been Elektra’s, and Christ, she doesn’t love him anymore, she doesn’t, but that _stings._ It’s maudlin and irrational, but God, that stings, because the one thing she’d thought to be impossible is reality, and that’s a blade in the sole of her shoe, cutting deeper with every step she takes.

And even before that, a part of her whispers, even before Lilith, there had been all those times he’d slipped away from her, slunk back to Columbia and to Nelson and to Lewis, without a word, without a single look back—

_Stop._

“Crystal,” Elektra says. “Completely.”

The rest of the drive to the Yakatomi Building is made in silence.

.

.

.

Darcy’s let herself into the building and gone down to stare at the graffiti by the time Kate gets there, forty minutes and a decade of her life later. The marks are unchanged. _Kuroi_ , for black. _Sora,_ for sky. Hand-done, delicately shaped, not a stray fleck of paint anywhere. Darcy’s changed, and pulled on her long-skirt-and-hoodie disguise over the top of the uniform, sitting cross legged in the middle of the boiler room and staring at the characters as if by looking for long enough they’ll come alive. It doesn’t get any easier, seeing it. Every time she blinks, Nobu’s lurking in the shadows. _Tell me what you have found out about the Black Sky,_ the blade in her hand. _You will answer me. I will hear if you are lying._ Nightmares all around, and she can’t get away.

 _Nobu Yoshioka._ Her stomach is sour with it. _He could have killed you,_ and he was going to, she’s sure of that, once he’d managed to get Matt there and put him down in front of her. Or maybe to put her down in front of him, she’s not sure. As soon as he’d had what he wanted, he would have slit her throat. He’d tried to kill Elena just because she was there, because she’d seen something that she shouldn’t have. Darcy—Darcy as a link to the Devil, Darcy nosing around into the yakuza, Darcy prodding at the Goodmans and at Nobu and at Fisk—Darcy would have been an elementary casualty.   _It seems like even the man in black has a weakness, then,_ and she doesn’t want to be anyone’s weak point, but Frank’s right. She’d kill for Matt and Matt would kill for her and that means that they’re targets on the other’s backs, bright and bloody, the way it’s always been. All thorns and blood and weakness and strength.

Being stronger together, she thinks, means being weaker apart.

 _I wish to speak with you. Even the man in black has a weakness. Tell me what you have found out about the Black Sky._ And the smell of Nobu burning, all scorched hair and flesh, gasoline and human meat and he’d fallen so quickly, a bonfire, the blaze of it bright behind her eyes—

 _Stop it._ “Stop it,” she says. “Stop it.”

 _(Bang,_ and Matt falls.)

Goddammit, she’s better than this. She’s _better_ than this. She has nightmares, yes, of course she has nightmares, she’s had nightmares since she was nine and Eli’s body was found in a garbage bag, but they’ve never weighed down on her like this before. She’s never been _distracted_ like this before. A piece of graffiti shouldn’t be able to knock her so sideways—

( _I am going to kill you._ )

—that she can’t even drag herself back to the present. She should be able to handle this, she’s handled everything else, she’s the rock, she’s the steady point, she has to be that—

( _Tell me what you have found out about the Black Sky._ )

—because if she isn’t the rock, then what is she? If she’s not the head of their weird little body, the head where Foggy’s the heart and Karen’s the nerve and Kate’s the bones, where Matt is the hands, reaching out, drawing the world in, then what the hell is she supposed to be anymore? Who is she—

( _The fewer lies you tell, the less he’ll hit you._ )

—if she’s not the one that they all trust to keep everything running, to keep things from falling apart? This is her own brain, her own mind doing this, and if she breaks then the whole thing might fall apart, even if they’re all a team, even if they’re all equal, because someone needs to do this, someone needs to be the immovable object to the world’s unstoppable force, and if it isn’t her then—

( _They found Eli._ )

—then who?

_You’re overstretching yourself. You spend every single moment you’re awake trying to take care of everyone. But you can’t do it forever. You try, it’ll wind up killing you._

_I’m not done yet,_ she thinks, staring at the graffiti. _You ruin me enough in the dark. I won’t let you haunt me in the daytime too._

The Orihara. Subsidiary, Elektra had said, of the Yoshioka. Darcy can’t remember ever hearing about the Yoshioka before now, not through any of her jaunts through the metro pages of the _Bulletin. New message to Ben Urich: ever heard of the Yoshioka crime family?_ She could ask Brett, too, she thinks, but not tonight. Brett’s already done enough, today, with the warning. With Finn looking into her and Matt, that presents a few issues, but that’s not something to be worrying about tonight. If the yakuza want Kate dead—not Hawkeye, but Kate—that’s a problem they have to deal with as quickly and as smoothly as possible. _Kate, Katie-Kate,_ Kate who’s had her back since the start, Katie who’s looked at the darkness of her world and bared her fangs and said _come and get me—_ the Yoshioka aren’t going to get the chance to lay their hands on Katie. She’ll break their wrists, first.

Her phone buzzes. Somehow, even in the basement, she has reception. Which is hilarious, because occasionally she can’t get a single bar on Elena’s couch.

_New message from Foggy (1/3): How the fuck did you get this guy to talk, Darce, this is crazy_

_(2/3): Karen’s the only one who can get him to say a word now_

_(3/3): And if that doesn’t disturb you like it disturbs me you are spending too much time with Matt_

Upon consideration, leaving Foggy and Karen—who are on the exact opposite sides of the _help Frank Castle_ issue—alone to deal with the arraignment had been much worse than a shitty move. A genuinely bad idea. _Shit._ Karen has reasons, she wants to say, Karen _has reasons_ for why she wants to talk to Frank Castle, and she can’t say a word of that to Foggy. She’d promised, and she’s not breaking that. Just— _you’re not being helpful when you’re calling Frank crazy, Fog._ The exact opposite, really. Darcy taps the phone against her lower lip.

_New message to Foggy (1/2): I’m not particularly disturbed and it has nothing to do with Matt_

_(2/2): And I don’t think you want to try my method._

_New message from Foggy: …that I do not_

_New message to Foggy: I’m sorry we had to run off_

_New message from Foggy (1/4): At least I know where you’re going mostly_

_(2/4): Which is not a hint for you to tell me, I don’t want to know what you’re doing with the Wicked Witch_

_(3/4): Karen’s in there now going over his options. Should be done in the next three hours or so_

_(4/4): You two owe me so goddamn much_

_Yeah,_ Darcy swypes, _we do_ , and gets a smiley face in return. _Turning off my phone. Should be back in a bit._

_New message from Foggy: Just let me know when you get in okay_

Her throat closes up. What with Elektra showing up, and Frank, and all the drama with Matt—shit. _Christ, I love my people._ She drops an emoji into his inbox, a little smirky devil face (which will piss him off and make him laugh and that, she thinks, is something Foggy’s been needing lately) and then turns off her phone. Not her Lilith phone, but her Darcy phone, the phone she uses for real-person work.  

Out of the corner of her eye, _kurozora_ seems to grow larger.

_Tell me what you have found out about the Black Sky._

The door clicks open. It’s Kate, in her work pants and a leather jacket, her sunglasses perched on her nose. “Hey,” she says. “Reasons why you’re trying to make the floor your bitch?”

“I was thinking.”

“That’s very static thinking.” She cracks gum between her teeth, and then spits it into the wrapper, folding it up in her hand. There’s a rubbish bin across the room, and of course—because Kate’s a fucking show-off—she makes the throw in one shot. “You usually pace.”

“I’ve been moving all day.” Darcy heaves herself to her feet. “What have you been doing?”

Kate kicks the door shut. “Adulting.”

“Really?”

“You don’t have to sound so surprised,” she says. “I had class. Wanted to stab a guy bitching about the transgender bathroom thing. Almost did.”

“Kate.”

“When I say _almost_ I just mean I snapped and snarled and told him to fuck off, and he shut up because he was shorter than me and it worked out fine.” She flaps a hand. “I read about Okinawa for a while because I looked at the kanji for _Ahagon_ and cried. Had Morales report in.” Her mouth twists. “My dad’s coming back for a fundraiser in a month and wants to meet me.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, ‘swhy I’m like an hour late.” Darcy still hasn’t met Kate’s dad. Or her sister. She gets the feeling this is deliberate, on Kate’s part, considering the few stories she _has_ been treated to on the subject. “He always calls at the worst possible time, basically. It’s like he’s psychic. And I haven’t heard from him since the Goodmans had their asses beat in court, so it’s been coming on for a while.”

Well. That’s phenomenally depressing. “You okay?”

“I’ll be fine as long as I don’t have to deal with him ragging on me changing my major again.” The art history thing from last year had been Kate’s dad’s decision, or so she’d learned later. Because art history is a great fit for Kate Bishop, as a major. “Or with my sister picking at my lifestyle. Or at both of them ganging up on me and insisting that I try something else. Or that I go back to that goddamn therapist they found for me.”

“The transphobic one?”

Kate’s face is all Scylla and Charybdis. “Can we find something for me to shoot? There’s been way too much shit today.”

“Ask and ye shall receive.” _Game time._ “According to Elektra—”

“I still find it slightly sketchy that we’re believing Matt’s ex-girlfriend about yakuza stuff and big things happening in the criminal underworld,” says Kate. “I thought he was like—super senses dude, how did he not pick up that she was some kind of crime princess?”

“I don’t think she was, back then.”

“If you say so,” she says, drawling. “Also, it’s weird as fuck that she’s back at all.”

“Kidlet, you haven’t met her, you have no idea how weird it is.” Darcy twists her hair back out of her eyes. “And you’re not going to meet her anytime soon, so don’t ask. The two of you would either get along really well, or kill each other within twenty minutes, and either way I don’t want to have to experience that.”

Kate rolls her eyes at that. “Yeah, sure. Whatever, Lewis.”

“Elektra’s difficult—” _Christ, she’s made things difficult_ “—but she’s not making any of it up. According to Elektra, Asano wants this building, for some reason. Probably the same reason Nobu Yoshioka wanted this building, though that’s still a mystery I really don’t like.”

“You’d think that considering it’s such prime real estate there would be more people wanting to make their rent on time.”

“Don’t be cute,” Darcy says, and Kate grins and knocks into her shoulder. “Since Asano is a huge, scary corporation with floors in skyscrapers and many firewalls and shell companies out the wazoo, even before it starts feeding into Roxxon, I figured you might be able to get us in on the business side of things. Or at least get a direction to go in.”

“You figured that while sitting in my boiler room staring at the kanji for _Black Sky._ ”

Darcy shrugs. “Am I wrong?”

“No, but honestly, fire escapes and iPods seem more your style for notions like that.” She gives Darcy a look that’s all sharp eyebrows and _quit your shit_. “Setting aside your deep, deep need for therapy—”

“You skip half your therapy appointments, don’t go there with me—”

“—I’ve been looking into Asano since you mentioned them a few weeks ago.  They smell exactly like Goodman-Okamura, which is to say, they smell like yakuza, but they’re a lot cleaner about it than the Goodmans ever were.” Kate pushes her sunglasses up into her hair. “Which probably means they’ve been around longer and know how to keep their shoes out of the shit.”

 _That doesn’t bode well for us being able to track them down and ask them to stop what they’re doing, pretty please and thank you._ “If you couldn’t find anything—”

“Hey,” says Kate, disgruntled. “Who linked Fisk with drug runners? Me. Who pinned Castle to the mat? Me. Who saves your dumb asses all the time? Me. I’m not just good, I’m awesome. And as it so happens I _do_ have a thing we might be able to run down, if you—” She stops. “Where’s Matt, anyway?”

“Helping Elektra with something.”

“…you’re joking.”

“They’re working on one side of the yakuza thing, we’re working on the other.” Darcy scrunches her nose. “Please don’t make that face.”

“Isn’t that—I dunno. Awkward?”

“You mean, do I like the idea that my—” _boyfriend, best friend, roommate, partner_ “—that Matt’s going to be pulling a _Mr. and Mrs. Smith_ thing with his ex-girlfriend? Not really, but the end goal is more important than me being uncomfortable.” She goes over it quickly, the book, the accountant, Hirochi. “If Asano and Hirochi want this building, then it could be in the ledger, but if it isn’t, then—”

“—we’ll have to look somewhere else, and even then, it’s possible they’ve kept it entirely off-book.” She sighs. “Fine, your funeral. It’s Hiroshi, by the way, not Hirochi. They romanized it weird. If this is the guy I think you’re talking about. I found the kanji for his name on Asano’s Japanese website.”

“Fine, Hiroshi. Yoshioka?”

She shakes her head. “Taira. Like— _Tale of the Heike_ Taira, not Okinawa Taira.”

“I’m going to pretend I know what that means.” Hiroshi Taira. And Hironobu Orihara. Nobu Yoshioka. “All likelihood is that the name is fake, but I figured, y’know, it’s a place to start. If we could track him back through the companies and through all his shell identities then we could find some—some affiliates or something we could go after, try to figure out who he is, what they’re doing back here.”

“So, what, you’re thinking about putting pressure on a crack in the dam?”

 _Whoa, flashbacks._ “Yeah, pretty much.”

“Cool.” Kate pushes her hair back out of her face. “If Elektra’s right and Taira’s at that party that Wayne and Talia al-Ghul are wandering through—”

Darcy almost chokes. _Talia al-Ghul?_

“—that means that there probably won’t be anything major going down tonight that needs his attention.” She sucks her teeth. “But that doesn’t mean nothing’s going to go down. Jess has been sending me pictures—”

“Wait, _Jess_?” Fucking hell. “Since when is Jessica Jones involved in this?”

“Hey, two weeks ago you gave me the name of a company and nothing else. Jess is a private dick. She might not be able to infiltrate like a corporate spy or anything, but she can sit and watch the Yakatomi Building when she’s not doing shit for Hogarth. And it’s not like I didn’t pay her, though she probably would have done it even if I hadn’t. Shit’s been going down here and, y’know. She’s worried, even if she’s not saying anything.”

Why isn’t there a chair in here? She wants to sink down and look dramatic about putting her face in her hands. “You could’ve told me you were bringing in Jess.”

“...did I not?”

“Kate.”

“I forgot, sue me.” Kate flickers a coin between her fingers. “And really, I’m not. She took photos and sat around and watched people going in and out of the building. She does that for Hogarth all the time, just—this time she was doing it for me.” Kate shifts her sunglasses again. “We could use her on this, I think. If we had to. I get the feeling she’s a lot twitchier about you guys going into shit like this without her than she wants to admit to herself.”

“I don’t think Jessica Jones is the blunt instrument we need to apply to this particular problem,” Darcy says, but there’s something warm and fuzzy in her ribcage now. Tribbles again. “But we can definitely keep that in mind.”

“Cool,” says Kate. “She says you missed her birthday, by the way. And owe her whiskey.”

“She’s a goddamn liar.”

“Well, I gave her whiskey anyway, because my dad has an insane liquor cabinet and he’s never going to notice.” Kate looks pleased. “She sent all the photos to my phone for me to go over, but basically there’s this. There are only a few people that Hiroshi Taira seems to talk to at all, at least from what Jess can tell from the café across the street. Though she did eavesdrop through fourteenth floor windows a time or two, according to the angle of some of the pictures. But yeah, whatever. There are only a few. These ones—” she pulls out her phone, flicks through a few photographs “—are the most common offenders.”

Three. The first one’s a woman, white—or no, not white, her skin is pale but her facial features have a cast to them like Kate’s. _Haafu_ , maybe. She’s redheaded, sharp-boned, tall without heels and with a look on her face like she’s carving the world open with a knife. “She’s not on the website,” Kate says, flicking through a few more pictures. “But I talked to Ben—”

“Ben’s in on this too?”

“Silver Trio,” says Kate. “Well, plus Jess. Who I suppose is like…Dean Thomas or someone, though, um, as the resident Ginny, I would not date Jess. She’s a human wrecking ball. Speaking of, we need to get Ben to read more _Harry Potter,_ he didn’t know what Silver Trio meant and that was sad.”

She must be bothered, if she’s this rambly. “Katie.”

“Right.” Kate draws herself up, and swipes to another photograph, of the redheaded woman and Hiroshi Taira sliding into a car. “I talked to Ben, and Ben talked to somebody who talked to somebody else who nosed around who dug up a fossil who told me her name is Rosanne McClintock. Which sounds fake, to me.”

“Probably is.”

“That’s what I thought. She comes and goes pretty randomly, at least from what Jess said, but she also may have tracked Miss Rosanne McClintock to a hotel on the Upper East Side a few days ago. So, there’s that.”

“Please tell me you didn’t go to this building to snoop around.”

“Funny, that’s exactly what Clint said. Like…right word order and everything.” She rolls her eyes. “I didn’t tell him about any of what we’re looking into, don’t worry. If we’re talking blunt instruments we don’t need, the Avengers are pretty high on the goddamn list. They’re busy with their own shit, anyway.”

Which is more of a relief than she wants to say. “Still not an answer to the question.”

“I may, possibly, have looked into the hotel registry just to see what room she was in. But that was it. Well.” She flicks a key card between her fingers. She’s been learning magic tricks, Darcy thinks. That or she hid it in her sleeve. “I may also have a way in. Officially.”

“You’re a devious little monster, Kate Bishop.”

“Thank you. Contestant number two—” a second photo, a black man, about Rosanne McClintock’s height but broader, built like a goddamn truck “—is head of security according to the Asano website. Name’s Raphael Green, which also sounds fake. And like a ninja turtle. Unlike Miss McClintock, he’s staying in an apartment, not a hotel, and thus it’s harder to break into without being completely obvious. Now, usually he’s seen with this guy—”

Kate says a name, but Darcy doesn’t quite hear it. She knows that face. She remembers that face. In the hallway outside Elena’s apartment, there had been Hironobu Orihara, and beside him this man, the man with the knife, the man who’d stood and watched, the man who’d tried to choke her with an arm around her throat. The world is the Hudson, just for a moment, the Hudson and a warehouse and burning hair and skin, the smears of red left behind on her wrists by the duct tape, and she can’t—Jesus. _Take a breath, take a goddamn breath, Lewis, come on._

“Darcy?”

“I’m fine.” Her voice cracks. “I’m—I’m fine. That’s Nam Suk Kim.”

Kate’s nose wrinkles. “I mean, on the site his name’s Harry Song.”

“He—um. He worked with Nobu, before.” _He was there when Nobu put the knife in my hand._ “He left, after Nobu died, we couldn’t track him down. Just kind of ghosted.”

“Oh,” Kate says. She looks at her phone. “Bastard. We could have Jess break his spine.”

“Ah, no.” That should _not_ sound as tempting as it does. “I’m—I’m fine.”

“You’re a worse bullshitter than I am.” Kate’s tapping her thumb in a staccato beat against the phone case, not looking at her. Very strongly Not Looking, like—force of ten thousand suns Not Looking. “Darcy, if—I know someone you can talk to. If you need to.”

“I’m fine.” _Christ, dragging a therapist into this—no._ Too many people know already. “So, um. If the yakuza are trying to kill you, first off, we—we don’t leave you alone. I know you can protect yourself, Kate, but I’d really not wake up to find you, like—dead.”

“We can’t let on that we know they’re trying to kill me.”

“Yeah, but you should _not_ be alone. And maybe—maybe you should stay out of the Park Avenue apartment for a little while, it’s too well-known as a target.”

“Clint’s still upstate, so the Bed-Stuy apartment is empty. They’re looking for Kate Bishop, not Hawkeye, there’s no reason I would go there.” She taps her phone to her lips. “Yoko, um. She just came back from a trip, but if I asked her she could go somewhere. Just in case.”

“Might be better.”

“At least now we know that the graffiti’s not just like…some clingers-on.” Kate rubs at her eyes. “Why the fuck do they want my goddamn building? There’s nothing special about it. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Yeah, well, we’re trying to figure that out.” She doesn’t look at the photo of Nam Suk Kim again. “Is Kim—”

“Apartment building. Doorman, keycode. State of the art security. We could get in if we tried, but it’d take a lot more time prepping than we have, really.” She blows hair out of her face. “I’m leaning towards looking into McClintock. She’s not officially affiliated with Asano, but she shows up too damn often to not have some kind of connection. And she’s the only link we have right now that we can chase without drawing too much attention to ourselves.”

“You think she’ll have something on why the yakuza want the building?”

“If not, then we can at least figure out some other names. See where we can go.” Kate lifts her eyebrows. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” They could also possibly get the shit beat out of them if anyone of the Wrong Sort realizes they’re breaking into the hotel room of a highly ranked yakuza lady, but that’s neither here nor there. “This’ll be fun.”

“You don’t have to sound so depressed about it.” She shakes a new piece of gum out of her dispenser, and offers it to Darcy. “You’re going to need to borrow some clothes, though. You probably won’t be able to get into this hotel looking like a woman on the run from an illegal desert commune.”

“How dressy are we talking here?”

“I mean, dressy enough. By the time we get there it’ll be like…eight-thirty, go big or go home, I say.” Kate eyes her shoulders. “You could borrow something from my sister’s closet.”

“I—um. I may have something.” Darcy most certainly _does not_ look at the bag with the dress in it. “I’ll just need shoes.”

“Works for me.”

The hotel is called the Commodore, which tickles the childish part of her that had had a huge crush on literally everyone in _Pirates of the Caribbean_ , minus Davy Jones and the Stupid Twins. (Fun fact: kind of hard to not realize you’re not quite straight when you harbor just as many fantasies about Elizabeth Swann as you do about James Norrington or Will Turner.) It kind of fits, weirdly—it’s not nautical-themed, or anything, just that as an American the word _commodore_ has conjured like…rich banisters and elegant stairwells and freaking expensive-ass paintings in cream hallways, and the Commodore definitely has those in spades. She’s half-expecting someone to pop out of a corner and offer her a flute of champagne or something, considering she’s currently wearing something that is probably way more expensive than has _ever_ touched her skin before. Like something Isabelle Lightwood might wear to a club. “Quit twitching,” Kate says into her ear. “You need to wear the dress, just—don’t freak out about this. And don’t spill red wine on it.”

Frankly, it’s more likely that Darcy’s going to get blood on it, but that’s an entirely different dealio. Anyway, the dress is mostly black, so it’s not like a stain will matter. _And_ it’s at exactly the right length, with exactly the right sort of slit, that she can strap a weapon to her leg without worrying about it being seen, but also be able to snap into a roundhouse kick if she has to, She just…might break her ankle thanks to these goddamn shoes.

Ever since they’ve started doing this—dating back to the infiltration of Our Lady of Sorrows hospital, Darcy’s pretty sure—Kate’s been slowly accumulating an entire armory of disguises, which always feels very _Mission Impossible._ Darcy has black hair, now, sharp around her jaw like Claire from _Jurassic World_ ( _too good for your own damn movie, my precious love_ ). Kate’s blindingly blonde, and the dress she’s wearing—which, for once, isn’t purple but a vivid blue—basically looks like it’s been painted on. The sleeves, at least, come all the way down to her wrists, which thankfully hides the bruises. Darcy had needed cover-up for some of the marks on her skin.

“Did you book this room in that wig?” Darcy says, and Kate tucks her arm through Darcy’s, cracking a bubble between her teeth. “That’s dedicated as fuck.”

“No pain, no gain. Besides, I didn’t want to stand out on the cameras.” She tugs a little. “This way.”

“You’re gonna trip me if you yank like that.” Her heels are about two inches taller than she’s used to (and Darcy’s used to pretty high heels, as someone cursed with Chronic Shortness but with a fondness for killer sex boots) so she’s staggering a bit. “Slow up.”

They don’t bother checking by reception, just sweep towards the elevators. No one comments. They get a weird look or two—the pair of them clearly aren’t related, even with sunglasses hiding their facial structure—but they don’t get commented on, and that’s all Darcy cares about. “If you’d come to that thing with me a few months ago you’d have worn higher. You need to practice.”

“I told you no high society shit for a reason, Katie, I don’t care what happened afterwards.”

“Jess came.”

“Jess was researching things for work.” She nearly stumbles. “Fuck.”

“Slow down, Selina, you’re gonna blow our cover,” says Kate, but she’s laughing. “You’re supposed to be classier than this.”

“Who the fuck told you I was classy? I’m good with my shitty sweatpants and my daytime television, thanks.” Darcy puts her shoulders back. “High society frightens me, and I do not want any part of it.”

“Your loss. It’s fun to throw olive pits at people.” She presses the elevator button. “So, realtalk. I booked the room four doors down from hers, since it was open and I could, and the last time I was here I stole a master-key off of one of the maids that should let us into the room. From the looks of things, no one’s noticed. I was thinking we could put in a call to her room, see if she’s there, and if she _does_ pick up just…bullshit with a wakeup call.”

“Does that work?”

“Sometimes,” Kate says. “The yakuza aren’t nearly so stupid as _Minbo_ would have you believe. But you’d be surprised who this has worked on. Besides, if we’re lucky, she won’t be there at all, and it’ll just ring out.”

“Or she could sit there and listen to it and stab us in the face when we try to walk in.”

“Or she could do that and we get to fight her. Either way I think we’re good.”

The elevator yawns open. Kate’s bouncing, twitching, jumping at the seams. Once, when she’d first moved to New York, Darcy had gone to the fish market and seen someone toss a whole crate of living lobster into a cauldron of boiling water. Kate isn’t one of the lobsters; she’s the water, rolling and greedy for meat. “You okay?”

She makes a face. “Don’t be nosy, Lewis.”

“But I’m so good at it.”

“I’m fine,” says Kate. “Just need to get some energy out. Come on, this way.”

The phone in room 1613 rings out. When they knock, there’s no answer. “All for one,” Kate says, and swipes the master-key over the pad, waiting for the light to turn green. No bombs go off, no smoke detectors, no wild scream of metal on metal that means someone’s unsheathing a blade. Just a dull thunk, and the creak of the knob. “I’m magic.”

“Keep it together, Weasley.”

Things Kate had forgotten to mention about the rooms here: they’re not _rooms_. Room 1613 is more like a full goddamn suite, complete with a set of couches and chairs, a coffee table, a room set aside for the mattress (king, not queen) and a standing bar. Someone’s been drinking expensive bourbon; there’s still a trace of it left on the glass, along with dark red lipstick. It’s all Darcy gets a glimpse of before Kate presses her back against the door, and says, “One sec.”

Darcy’s not entirely sure _what_ Kate does—fiddles with her watch, or something—but there’s a short sharp whine, pushpins in her eardrums. “What the hell—”

“A/V disruptor.” The quirk to her mouth is a little more Tony Stark than it is Clint Barton, but the mischief is exactly the same. “Borrowed it from the relevant parties in case they left surveillance in here.”

“Do the relevant parties know you borrowed it?”

“The relevant parties and their goddamn robots can bite me. He won’t quit calling me Big Bird.”

“Might have something to do with the fact that you keep borrowing things from him without asking,” says Darcy. “Come on. I don’t want to be in here very long in case she comes back.”

No one under the bed, no one in the bathrooms. Yakuza Lady—supposedly Rosanne McClintock, but Yakuza Lady sounds better, in Darcy’s head—actually uses the closet and the chest of drawers that have been provided, which for some reason makes her skin creep. _How long is she planning on staying here, anyway?_ The room smells of old rose petals, dry and haunting and funereal. “What’s the thread count on these sheets?”

“Let’s go with high out the ass and leave it at that.” Kate looks at her watch again, and slinks into the kitchen, picking through the contents of the (full-sized, holy damn) fridge, starting in on the cabinets. “I think this stuff is all imported. Look! Vietnamese fish sauce.”

“I think I can get that in the local Asian supermarket.” There’s nothing in the bedside table aside from an old Bible, well-thumbed, nestled on top of a much fresher, sharper-looking King James edition. Darcy flicks it open, pages through. The pages are wafer thin, and a few of them have marks in pencil under certain lines. “The one with all the crabs on the sticker?”

“Yeppers.” A drawer crashes shut. “All this food _and_ she’s stuffing this fridge with high-end takeout, damn. She could use the stove.”

“Maybe she’s lazy.” Darcy sinks down onto the side of the bed (it’s made the way a veteran’s bed is made, sharp at the corners and along the top). The ribbon’s hooked through Revelation. _Totally not creepy as fuck, okay_. “How widespread is Christianity in the yakuza?”

“No fucking clue. Christianity isn’t really a thing in Japan.” Kate unscrews the fish sauce, sniffs it, and makes an unhappy noise. “Actually, religion isn’t really a thing in Japan. Not organized, anyway. There’s a saying that you’re born Shinto and die Buddhist, because Buddhist temples handle funerals and Shinto shrines handle births and things, but people don’t really go to shrines or temples unless it’s as a tourist or if they need support for a big change in their lives. I remember my sister studied abroad there and went for like…a New Year’s thing for high school students offering prayers to get into the colleges they wanted. Big damn deal.”

 _And he had in his right hand seven stars: and out of his mouth went a sharp two-edged sword_ — _Jesus. Bro. Chill a little with the imagery here._ She turns the page. “So not really a thing for the yakuza.”

“I mean, who knows. People have their own individual things. It’s possible. And if she’s half-Japanese—which I’m not sure how that would work with the yakuza either, since yakuza pride themselves on being modern samurai—it’s possible her mom was a Japanese Christian. It’s rare, but it’s not unheard of.”

“Couldn’t her dad have been Japanese?”

Kate’s voice gets tight. “Most often it’s the mom. And—I mean. A lot of times the dads don’t stay.”

There’s a mark in pencil beneath 1:17 and 1:18, pressed so sharp into the wafer pages that they’ve almost torn. _And he laid his right hand on me, saying unto me, Fear not; I am the first and the last / I am he that liveth, and was dead; and behold, I am alive for evermore. Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death._ The other pages aren’t rubbed smooth like this one is, the words fading in places like someone’s stroked their fingers across the paper, wiping the ink away. _Shit._ “Put the fish sauce away.”

“Fine, if you’re gonna be boring.” She puts it back in the cabinet anyway. “Whatcha looking at?”

“Nothing, I don’t think.” Darcy pages through the rest of the Bible. There’s a bookmark caught in Psalms, and a torn page in the Book of John, but other than that, nothing of interest, really. She settles it back where it was, on top of the hotel’s copies of the Bible, the Qur’an.  “Just—she likes Revelation.”

“You mean the parts that predict the end of the world?” Kate wrinkles her nose. “Like that’s not ominous as hell.”

“Maybe she just likes the imagery. I wrote a paper on it in college, it’s pretty…unique. In a lot of ways.” Darcy heaves herself to her feet again, nearly staggering back out of the shoes. “She can’t have left nothing here, come on. Get your head out of the fridge.”

Nothing under the couch. Nothing in any of the drawers. When Kate shifts the mattress to the side on a hunch, they find throwing knives, and ease the whole thing back into place. Arguably there’s a bit of luck when Darcy scrounges a receipt out of the pocket of the woman’s jacket, a café near Elena’s tenement, but other than that it’s clean, in here, and they’ve spent a good hour and a half wandering around and getting dressed up for not much of anything other than figuring out that Rosanne McClintock reads the Bible before going to sleep.

“Fuckballs,” says Darcy.

“Not quite.” Kate crouches, and presses her fingertips to the underside of the coffee table. “Bug. If she does say anything interesting in here, I can keep an ear on it.”

“Just you?”

“She’s probably going to be speaking Japanese, Lewis.” Kate rolls her eyes. “So unless you or Jones turned into polygots when I wasn’t looking it’s gonna have to be me.”

“Yeah, whatever.” McClintock’s probably taken all the paperwork with her, wherever she’d gone. If she had any paperwork at all, Darcy thinks—it’s possible she’s just carrying around a popgun and waiting to shoot Kate dead in the street. “Seriously, Katie, are you okay?”

“Ah, shit, don’t call me Katie.” Kate fumbles another bug into the lampshade. “I’m fine, seriously. The thing with my dad isn’t a thing, just a pain in the ass.”

“You know that’s not what I’m talking about.”

“Great, okay.” She rolls a bug across her palm. “Yeah, okay, we can talk about this if you want. Apparently the yakuza want me dead, for some reason. Who knows why. Not Hawkeye but me. Which is new.” And there goes the bug, smacked on the underside of the windowsill. “It’s kind of a thing.”

“I’m just saying, it’s okay to be kind of freaked out right now, all right?”

“And I told you, I’m fine. You don’t have to worry.”

“Kate.”

Kate drops an absolutely filthy look over her shoulder. “You really have to watch yourself with the angry mom voice, it’s kind of awful.”

“The yakuza are trying to kill you, that warrants an angry mom voice.” She may, possibly, be overreacting—it’s not like people don’t try to kill them every day, for a lot less than a building they require for hitherto undiscovered nefarious purposes—but she’s _worried_ , dammit. It’s rusting between her teeth. “I’m kind of more worried that you’re not worried.”

“I mean, I’m not _not_ worried, I’m just—not sure that caring too much about it will do anything other than make things harder.” Kate went into the kitchen, clapped a third bug under the shelf with the fish sauce on it. “There’s just not a lot you can do, y’know?”

“Yes,” says Darcy. There’s a laser target on her chest, and Nobu’s staring at her in an empty warehouse, and there’s a gun to her head and Elena’s blood is dripping to the floor of the tenement, all at once. “I know. It kinda sucks.”

“That’s a way to put it.” She rolls her shoulders, pops her back. “Bonus of them not knowing who I really am—Hawkeye doesn’t need to go quiet while we deal with this.”

“Kate—”

“Don’t box me up entirely, Darcy, I’ll burn the building down.”

 _If you put it that way._ “I’m—”

“Worried,” Kate says, and gives her a sideways  look. “I know you’re worried.”

Darcy shuts up, and kicks her heel against the back of the couch.

“Well.” She smacks one last bug against the ceiling fan, and gets down. “If they _do_ say anything of note in here we can at least keep an eye on it. Who knows. I didn’t dare bug her car in case she found it, she seems like one of those people who—”

 _Plays accordion?_ Darcy thinks. _Moisturizes daily?_ Who knows. The click from the door kind of drowns out whatever Kate is going to say. She’s not sure if Kate grabs her or if she grabs Kate, but in the next instant they’re both crammed into the closet, the half-open, full-of-clothes closet, pressing each other back into the corner and trying not to breathe too loudly. “Shit,” Kate says through her teeth, fumbling with the A/V disruptor on her wrist, “ _fuck_ —” and then the door’s clicking shut again, and someone’s dumped a bag onto the carpet. The cleared throat says _woman._ The footfalls say just one.

 _Fucking fuckballs._   

“ _Yoku kiiteru_?” She has a clear voice, Rosanne McClintock. Almost lyrical. “ _Kakushite. Matte. Shizuka ni shite. Sou ittan deshou? Kono youna bakana koto shitara kakushitenain da._ ”

Kate, pressed up against the back wall with her hand over Darcy’s mouth— _thanks, Katie, like I was going to fucking talk_ —goes cement still.

“ _Kankei nai. Kamawanai. Urusaitteba_!”There’s a clunk of heavy bag on furniture. “ _Mou juubun da yo. Yamenasai. Konkai wa omaera no saigo no chansu da, Souchi._ ”

Kate makes the tiniest sort of sound, barely audible even for Darcy. Darcy shuts her eyes, leans hard into Kate’s hand, trying not to gag. _Fuck, fuck fuck fuck, what does that mean, I don’t know what that means and oh my god what’s even happening_ —

 _“Yametoke. Konna koto ni_ —”

 _Chansu_ , at least, she knows. _Chance_. And _kakushite, matte_ , she knows those too. _Hide. Wait. Be quiet._ Kate had taught her those right off the bat, just in case. Darcy squeezes her fingers tight into Kate’s ribs, and shuts her eyes.

“ _Nanimo shinaide_ ,” says Yakuza Lady, It cuts off when a phone rings. Short and sharp, to the point. Not Darcy’s, and not Kate’s, either. Either McClintock has two phones, or she’s psychic or something, who knows. The tone is a song that Darcy doesn’t recognize, electro-hip hop claws over her skin. “ _Chotto matte_ ,” she says, and then clears her throat. “ _Hai, moshi moshi_.”

_Breathe, Darcy, breathe—_

“ _Kashikomarimashita_ ,” says McClintock. “ _Yakatomi made—hai. Ima sugu kimasu._ ” A few soft _hais_ , a soft scoffing noise like she’s clearing her throat, then: “Shit.”

Yakatomi, _Yakatomi, shit, are they made—_

“Kim,” McClintock says, and her voice dips. “ _Hai, wakatta. Ima kuru yo. Nandakedosa, bishoppu no biru no koto—aa. Mondai ga aru sou da._ ” Pause. There’s a flicker of shadow on the wall. “ _Ahagon ni yoru to dareka—hai.  Ima anmari abunakunai kedo sa._ ” Another pause, and then: “ _Hontou ni daijoubu ka? Hitori de. Un. Yakatomi made kurun dakedo—_ ”

With that, the door snaps shut. Kate leaves her hand behind on Darcy’s mouth, and Darcy’s not sure if it’s because she’s forgotten it was there or if she’s trying to keep Darcy from screaming or something, who knows. Then she presses the button on the disruptor again, and the hand makes more sense. Still, Darcy’s pretty sure that Kate’s palm is the only reason she _isn’t_ throwing up, really. Her guts are gory cacophonies of tears and knots and open, bloody cuts. 

“Shit,” Kate says, and knocks her head to the wall. “That was close, Jesus.”

“Kate.” It’s muffled against Kate’s palm. _Breathe, Darcy._ In and out and in again, and she’s still toppling on the edge of panic when she yanks Kate’s hand away from her face. “Kate, what did—”

“They called her into the Yakatomi Building,” Kate says. “She didn’t say anything more than that.”

“Did they—”

“All she said was that they wanted her back at the building. It could be anything, calm down.”

“I’m calm,” Darcy says. No, snaps. She snaps, and then shuts her eyes and breathes through her nose. “Shit. Sorry.”

“It’s okay.” She hesitates. “If they’d been made,” says Kate quietly, “she would have mentioned it.”

“I know.” _But I’m stressed as all fucking hell and this isn’t helping._ Darcy swipes open her recent calls history, scrolls down until she finds Elektra’s number. _New message: one of H’s friends headed your way. Both of you be careful._ “I heard her say Bishop.”

“Yeah, uh, apparently the Ahagons aren’t supposed to be calling that much attention to themselves, she basically told them to sit the fuck down or die.”

“Well, that at least, y’know. It lets us know where things are headed.” She taps at her hip. If she calls Matt right now, she could blow their cover, she could wreck it, if the yakuza haven’t noticed she could ruin everything, but—Christ. She wants to hear him say they’re okay. She’s not sure she’ll believe it, unless she does. “What do you want to do?”

“We could talk to the Ahagons,” says Kate. She smooths her hands over her thighs. “Or, I don’t know. If we do it might bite us in the ass. They’d wonder how we knew that the Ahagons were yakuza. What do you want to do?”

Go to the Yakatomi Building. Drag Yakuza Lady back in here and beat the answers out of her. Half a dozen other things that her brain’s racing too fast to parse out. “I don’t know.”

Her phone buzzes. _New message from (unknown): Both of us? You keep up with messages like that I’ll start to think you care._ Then a second message, a candid shot of the room, people in suits, dim lighting. No blood, no death. A second photo, Elektra cocking her eyebrows, and no further response. No evidence of Matt, but she really, really doubts he’s more than two feet away. _Thank Christ._ Darcy throws her phone back into her bag.

“What is it?”

“They’re fine. Elektra’s taking selfies.” She rubs hard at her nose. “I’m so fucking done with these games. I shouldn’t have let them drive away.”

A hand catches at hers. Kate’s, fingers callused, nails painted deep plum. She squeezes Darcy’s hand so hard that her bones ache, and Darcy squeezes back. “Matt’s fine,” Kate says. In spite of logic, in spite of everything, something in her relaxes. “Matt’s going to be fine. Nobody will be able to sneak up on them, and he’s fought yakuza before. He’ll be okay.”

( _Bang,_ and Matt falls—)

“If he isn’t—”

“He will be.”

“If he isn’t,” Darcy says again, “then the yakuza have a problem.”

Kate digs her nails in, and doesn’t let go. “Yeah.”

Silence, for a bit.

“We should go,” Darcy says. “Before someone realizes we’re here.”

“Not yet.” Kate draws away. “I want to look at this.”

She hadn’t noticed, and she turns a bit pink when Kate points out the briefcase on the table. It hadn’t been there before. No numbered lock, just a clasp, and when Kate pops the flap there’s a scent to the air like raw earth. It’s paperwork, full of graphs and photos of something that looks like bloodwork, and it’s almost entirely in Japanese. Kate hands Darcy one file, takes another. “Take pictures,” she says. “We don’t have enough time to actually read through it now.”

Darcy doesn’t argue. She settles the file on the tabletop, flicks through each page. “Can you make out any of this?”

“I mean, bits.” Kate tucks her hair behind her ear, takes another photo. “This one is medical reports. I don’t know most of this. There are over two thousand five hundred individual kanji characters, and it’s not like I’ve been studying medical jargon. Beyond some basic information—age, height, weight, blood type—there’s not much I can understand, no.”

“Why would the yakuza be looking into medical reports? Are they stolen?”

“I don’t think so.” Kate turns another page. “We can ask Yoko to look over them, before—before I send her somewhere safe.”

It takes about ten minutes to go through all of them. Seven different files, and each file has who knows how many pages. The last is the smallest, the simplest. Only a few pages in English. Newspaper articles, not medical reports. _Daredevil,_ says one. _Lilith_ , says another. _Hawkeye,_ and a few notes about Kate Bishop on TMZ. A piece about a John Doe found out by the docks last year, a burned body thought to be a child. When she checks the date— _f_ _uck, fuck, fuck._ The boy, the boy that Stick killed. _What was your name, kid?_

“If this kid really was the Black Sky,” Darcy says, “then what the hell are they even looking for anymore?”

“I don’t know.”

Another scrap of silence, spiraling away.

“We should go,” Darcy says. “Before anyone comes back.”

Kate nods. “What do you want to do?”

There’s not much else they _can_ do. It’s quagmiric, this conundrum. Medical records, the Ahagons, the Black Sky, the yakuza. If they do anything too obvious, it could draw attention to Kate, which is the last thing she wants at the moment, but they can’t exactly do nothing, either. Fisk had never been simple, not at all, but all of a sudden she wishes they could go back to that: a clear enemy, a clear chain of command, a clear goal that they had to work against. This is too murky. She can’t make out the bottom, can’t break the surface. They’re mired in the mud with vines wrapping around their ankles.

“Let’s just—patrol,” Darcy says, finally. “I need to hit something.”

“Seconded,” says Kate, and settles the briefcase back into place on the tabletop. “If we head back to the tenement then we can probably keep an eye on things for a little while.”

“Fine by me. I can change out of these goddamn clothes.”

“Oh, sure,” says Kate, opening the door. “Unless you want to—”

Darcy can’t process it, at first. Someone slams a hand down on her head, shoves her to the floor. There’s carpet fiber on her tongue when she rolls back to her feet. Kate’s out in the hall, and the woman—it is a woman, a woman in a sharp suit with a curved blade held tight in one fist—snaps to attention when Darcy gets up, kicks out of the stupid shoes. _Barefoot, whatever. It’ll hurt like shit but at least it’ll keep me from snapping an ankle._ “Get _down_ ,” Kate snaps, and Darcy ducks again just in time to avoid the dagger that comes from the other end of the hall, lands deep in the wall of the Commodore. _Sorry, Norrington._ The second woman bares her teeth, and draws another knife.  

“Oh,” Darcy says, and snaps out the baton. “Great, now _I_ get yakuza. Kind of been waiting for this.”

“Something’s really wrong with you,” says Kate, and then there’s no time to speak. The hallway is too narrow for this, a terrible goddamn place to fight, and there’s one Sharp Suit on Kate’s side (cornrow braids and brown eyes) and one on Darcy’s (Asian, but more Indonesia or the Philippines than Japan or Korea), which means it’s _way_ too cramped for close combat. Sharp Suit One has another blade, probably has half a dozen of them hidden in her sleeves and down her pants, and they’re wicked little things, these knives, broad and palm-length with a diamond sharp tip. Sharp Suit One’s holding hers in a reverse grip, and _Christ,_ it’s sharp, Darcy doesn’t even realize it’s clipped her until blood slicks down her arm and _I really, really wanted not to leave any DNA here, fuck my life_. She’s really, really glad she hasn’t turned the baton over to Melvin yet, because the taser wouldn’t have stopped a blade. Kate’s produced a baton of her own from absolutely nowhere, a thin thing that she’s snapped out to about the length of her forearm, but she’s not as practiced with it as she is with her bow, and it shows. _Pay attention, girl_ , and she swerves just in time, the edge of the blade barely coasting over her cheek, opening the old glass cut right back up, and _shit, okay, we’re done._ Darcy snags Sharp Suit One’s wrist, and twists it, slamming her hand into the wall, forcing the knife out of her fingers. Her elbow snaps out without conscious thought, clipping the woman in the jaw, driving her head hard into the plaster. Sharp Suit sways when she lets go, only half balanced, and one more blow—hard, with the baton, clipping her chin and sending her spinning—has her sliding down the wall in silence, still breathing. In the next moment, Kate’s heaved herself into a snapping spin kick that clips Sharp Suit Two in the jaw. She’s down in the next moment. Darcy looks at the women, and then up at Kate, her heart jumping like a jackrabbit, blood streaking down her cheek.

“Christ,” Kate says. “I don’t like yakuza.”

“Okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Darcy says, and snags her shoes. “Emergency stairs.”

“You read my goddamn mind.”

.

.

.

 “I’m not doing that.”

“Don’t be childish.”

“Elektra—”

“For God’s sake, Matthew, what other choice do we have?”

.

.

.

Even with all the cleanup, she still somehow winds up getting in before Matt does. Darcy kicks the door closed, strips off The Dress (because it is definitely The Dress, now, The Dress that she’s fought and bled in, and she can’t exactly give it up at this point), and steps right into the shower, whining a little at the spark of cold water before the heater kicks in. She’d swung by Claire’s on the way back, and had her cut pronounced “a goddamn sloppy mistake, Lewis, Jesus,” but nothing that needed stitches, which means she whines again when the water hits it but bites her tongue until the stinging fades. The adrenalin’s cycled out, now. The edge from the fight is gone, and now she’s just—hyperaware. Jittery, but not jumpy. Thirty minutes under the hot water soothes the rough pieces, but it doesn’t do anything to ease the wakefulness. She can’t sleep, not after tonight. Not after this. 

 _What the fuck was all that?_ This is nothing like any yakuza shit she’s ever heard of. The Ahagons, sure, that’s one thing, and Yakuza Lady being all badass and terrifying, and guards in the hall, all of that makes sense, but the rest of it? The medical shit? It doesn’t smell like regular organized crime bullshit. She’s not sure what it is, exactly, but it sounds nothing like anything she’s ever heard of. She can’t focus on anything, only the strange, creeping sense that shit’s going down in places she can’t see, and it’s going to hurt them all later.

She texts Foggy— _home okay, go to sleep_ —and flops onto the couch to stare at the ceiling. _Fuck._ Her arm hurts. They can’t actually trust any of the information that comes in through the bugs, now—if Yakuza Lady finds them, then there’s no guarantee they won’t get bad intel, and be lured into a trap—but all the photos have come out clear. Kate’s going over them with Yoko, and they’ll hopefully have something soon. And another text had come through from Elektra (she opens her phone up again, puts Elektra into the address book under “E”—nothing more, nothing less) to let her know that they’d escaped and succeeded and all was well, so it’s not…completely terrible. Just. Her arm hurts, she’s tired, Kate’s angry, she doesn’t understand any of this, and she hates, hates, _hates_ groping around in the dark for answers that keep dangling just out of reach.

 _Kim._ Nam Suk Kim. Nobu. _Tell me what you have found out about the Black Sky._ And no, she’s not going to do this, she’s _not going to do this_ , she can’t do this, but like hell is she going to get sleep tonight with all of it whirling in her head, and for fuck’s sake, why can’t she just— 

“ _Hey, it’s Foggy, get your ass to the phone. Hey, it’s Foggy—_ ”

She nearly fumbles it. Darcy presses her phone to her ear. “Hey.”

“Hey.” It cracks. “Hey, uh—is Matt with you?”

“No, he’s not back yet.” _Fuck. Nothing more, not tonight, please don’t let anything else have happened tonight—_ “Foggy, what’s wrong, did something happen?”

“Something.” He takes a breath. “Darcy, Castle—Castle pleaded not guilty.”

She glitches again. She actually cannot comprehend it, right now, on top of blades and blood in the hallway. Exhaustion hits her full in the chest, and knocks her silly. Darcy fades into the couch. “…what.”

“He pled not guilty.”

 _Are you fucking shitting me._ She’s going to _kill_ Frank Castle, Jesus fucking Christ. “ _What the fuck_!”

“I’ve been trying Matt, he won’t pick up, but Darcy—” Foggy’s winding up into a panic, the same way he used to when they were at Columbia and there was a test unexpectedly or a forgotten assignment, voice getting higher and sharper. “Darcy, Reyes—it’s been fast-tracked, we can’t stop it, the trial starts next week, he _pled not guilty_ , I thought you said—”

“Foggy, slow down—”

“Reyes fast-tracked the goddamn trial and now we have to defend the Punisher _._ In court. We have to defend the _Punisher_.” He’s all popping frustration and panic, and fucking hell. God shit damn fuck hell. “This is _not_ what I signed on for, Darcy—”

“I know, Foggy, I’m—shit.” She rubs a hand over her face. “We’ll talk about it, we’ll figure something out, I’m so—” Her voice breaks. “Christ, Foggy, I’m so sorry, I know you didn’t want to do this—”

“I didn’t say that to make you apologize, Darcy, Jesus—”

“Yeah, but—”

“I don’t want to do this,” he says. “But it mattered to you guys, and it mattered to Karen, and, you know. We’re doing it now, apparently. Just—I don’t want to talk to him if I don’t have to. I’d rather Karen not talk to him either, but apparently, that’s a thing, I don’t know.” He pauses. “Please don’t be late, tomorrow morning. I know how tired you guys are and I know that what you’re doing is important, but just—please, please don’t be late.”

“We won’t. Foggy, we won’t—you’re not alone doing this, okay? You won’t be. I swear to you. This is—we started this, I’m not dropping it now.”

Foggy sighs, gusting over the phone. “Okay. Just—fuck.” On the other end, there’s the ding of a microwave. “You okay? You sound like shit.”

“I’m fine. Just—bruised.” She swallows. _Worried and bruised and caught up in old memories, how are you?_ “I managed to get myself cut, but it’ll be fine. I’ll tell you more tomorrow, okay? No broken bones. Only vague trauma.”

“That’s not helpful.”

There’s a key in the lock. “Matt’s home.”

“Thank Christ.” Foggy goes quiet, for a second. Matt shuts the door, locks it. His eyebrows are already magneted together over his glasses. “Pick up my fucking phone calls, buddy.”

“Had to turn it on silent,” Matt says, but Foggy can’t hear that part. “Sorry.”

“He’ll pick up your phone calls,” Darcy tells Foggy. “From now on. He swears. Cross his heart.”

“Yeah, sure he will,” Foggy says, but it’s tired, rather than pissed, and amused, rather than sad, and that, at least, is better than nothing. “Because he has such a great track record so far. We should all probably come in early, honestly, I don’t—I don’t trust any of the files Angie gave me. Even though Angie gave them to me and Angie is infallible, I don’t trust any of these files. Reyes may have cursed them.”

“Duel of Fates,” Darcy says. “Go watch _Star Wars,_ it might help.”

“Maybe.”

“ _The Force Awakens._ ”

“I do appreciate rathtars.” He sighs again. “Just—nine tomorrow, okay? Or eight-thirty. Something.”

“Aye-aye, Foggy-Bear.”

“I still hate Matt for telling you about that nickname,” says Foggy. “Good night.”

“Good night.”

Matt’s quiet, when she hangs up the phone. He’s quiet when she curls her knees up into her chest, and he’s quiet when she throws the cell phone back into her bag, and he’s quiet even when she curses under her breath, slow and awful, biting every letter. It’s only once she’s lifted her head again to look at him that he says, “Trial?”

“Trial.”

He hisses, long and low. “Fuck.”

And that’s something, from Matt. That’s definitely something. “I’m going to kill Frank Castle.”

It’s not an actual threat, not this time. Still. “He might actually listen if you yell at him.”

“I really doubt it. Besides, with Reyes involved, we’re not gonna get the chance to let him change his plea.” She rubs at her eyes. “I’m so—God. I want things to stop happening for like three seconds. Just—I don’t know. Three seconds, an hour. A day, I don’t know.”

Matt crosses the floor, and touches his fingers to her cheek, finding a bruise. “What happened?”

“Yakuza.” She shuts her eyes. “Knife clipped me, it’s fine. I had Claire check it. How was the party?”

“The party was a party. Elektra has the book. It’s encoded. We left. Nobody realized who we were.” Matt shakes his head. “Why didn’t you call?”

“Same reason you didn’t. We could handle it, and we did. I didn’t want to risk blowing your cover at the Yakatomi Building just because Kate and me ran into a pair of snags with a shared knife fetish.” She makes a face at him. “Besides, if you wanna tell me you smuggled that book out without getting into a single goddamn fight, then I will call bullshit. They were circling the wagons before you were there for two hours.”

Matt’s lips go thin, but he can’t argue with that part. Darcy unfolds from the couch, and brushes by him to go find her computer. “You okay?”

“I’m bruised,” she says. “Pissed and bruised and achy, that’s all. Everything turned out all right.” Darcy bites the inside of her cheek. “The yakuza are doing something weird.”

“Weird how?”

“Like…I don’t know. There were files that had like…medical shit. And a few more that looked like building plans, but I can’t read Japanese, I don’t have any idea when or where or why or how.” She’s too awake to sleep, too tired to think. “Kate’s, um. She’s gonna stay at Clint’s for a few days, until we can figure out how to make them back off her. I’d rather not deal with someone aiming a sniper at her head before we get the message.”

“Obviously.” Matt catches her as she passes him again, holds on. “Are you okay? You sound—”

And there he shuts up, like he can’t actually describe it. Darcy would pick _frustrated._ And _fucked over._ And _twisted._ She sounds twisted, knotted up into a tangle, a hard mat at the base of her tongue. “I’m—um. I don’t—actually know.”

Matt doesn’t say anything, really. When she steps into him, knocks her head to his shoulder and breathes, he puts both arms around her and holds on. He smells like the inside of the limo, like Elektra’s perfume, like alcohol and blood and wood polish, but his heartbeat—that helps, just a little. Darcy shuts her eyes, and fists her hands up in the shirt.

“Hey.” It shivers, from him to her, less spoken than felt. “You’re shaking.”

 _Fuck my life._ “It’s—” She stops. “I think tonight is gonna be a bad night.”

Matt stills for a breath, for a second. “Dreams?”

“Kim is back,” she says, and her voice breaks a little. He freezes solid. “Just—Kim is back.”

“Nam Suk Kim?”

“Kate had pictures. I’m just—” _I need to be better than this._ Darcy wraps her arms tight around his ribs. “He didn’t even really do anything, and I’ve had so many people do—do worse than just hold a knife on me, but I don’t—”

“If it’s a bad night it’s a bad night.” Matt threads his fingers into her hair. “You want to stay out here?”

“I want to not think,” she says. “I want—I want to not think. Or remember, or be as—” _as fucked up as I seem to be._ “I just need not to think about anything. Tonight was hard.”

“Yeah.”

There’s something very odd about his voice, right now. Darcy looks up at him. “What’s up?”

He wavers on the edge of speech. “It was—complicated. Getting the book out.”

 _That’s totally not ominous._ “Did someone get hurt, or—”

“No, nothing—nothing like that, no.” He stops, wets his lips. “We can talk about it tomorrow, when you’re not—not so tired.”

And that’s the _Matt is running from the uncomfortable things_ voice, which is _not_ what she needed tonight, not on top of everything. To be entirely honest, she’s half-tempted to let him. But no, that’s—that’s not what either of them need right now, to avoid things, to not talk about things, not after everything he’s told her. Slowly, Darcy pulls away from him. “What happened?”

She didn’t think he could go paler than he already was, but he manages it, somehow. There’s something dead and grey around his mouth. “Darcy, seriously—”

“Please just—” She pinches the bridge of her nose. “Please tell me.”

Matt clears his throat, not once but twice. He steps back, and heads for the kitchen. “Nothing happened. Not—nothing actually happened.”

Her mouth feels too sticky to speak. Darcy watches as he goes through the mechanisms of coffee, setting the kettle to boil, all of it. The words keep catching on her lips. “You’re, um. You’re kind of making it worse by talking around it, y’know.”

“Just—” He doesn’t fumble the bag of coffee beans, but he comes close. Matt turns off the stove, back on and then off again, like he can’t decide. “Nobody figured out who we were, there wasn’t really any big problem, getting out was just—complicated.”

“Seriously—” 

“There were guards,” he says, baldly. “There were guards coming our way and we didn’t have time to hide anywhere, really, we didn’t want to blow our cover or draw attention, there were only so many things that would have worked and kept them from—”

“Matt—”

He’s _babbling,_ Jesus. “I swear to you, nothing happened, if there had been any option other than that I would have taken it but there was no time, they were right behind us and there wasn’t any _time_ —”

Several heavy things clunk together inside her brain. “You pretended to have snuck off to have sex,” she says, and Matt flinches. He opens his mouth, and shuts it again, and finally turns the water off one last time, yanking the undone tie out of his collar and flinging it onto the dining table. “Seriously?”

“Darcy—”

“ _Seriously?_ ” She stalks to the bedroom door and back. She wants to break something. “Just—Jesus _fuck_.”

“Nothing happened,” Matt says, and _don’t you be angry with me, Matt Murdock._ “It wasn’t like there was any other choice.”

“Because that’s nice to hear, that the only choice you have left is—” Fucking hell. Darcy seizes a pillow from the couch, and digs her nails into it. _Throw it. Scream. Cry, throw up._ Overload, everywhere. “ _Shit_!”

“Darcy—”

“I get it, okay, I don’t want—”

“This is why I didn’t want to tell you tonight—”

“What happened today has nothing to do with this—”

“You don’t have to worry about Elektra and me—”

And that has her temper roaring up out of the dark, a dragon blazing fire, acid snarling up into her throat. “Jesus Christ, I _know that_!” She throws the pillow as hard as she can against the wall. It’s not enough. She wants something to _shatter_ , and when the hell did Lilith snarl so close to the surface? _Fuck, fuck, fuck._ “I _know_ that, Matt, okay, will you—just fucking stop acting like I think you’re going to cheat on me the first chance you fucking get!”

He jerks. “Darcy, for God’s sake—”

“When are you going to get it through your head that I don’t—I trust you, okay, you _asked_ me to be there with you but _I_ trust you, it’s not the same thing as you not trusting yourself—” 

“But you _don’t_ ,” he says, “not the way you used to,” and Christ, is that what this is about? “I don’t know what else I can do or say to get you to believe me about this—”

“What happened with Frank and what’s happening with Elektra aren’t the same thing!”

“Aren’t they?”

“Jesus Christ, Matt, no, me not being sure I can trust you not to get yourself killed is—is totally different than from what’s going on with Elektra! Do you honestly think—”

“I don’t know what to think!”

“Then I don’t know what to tell you!” 

“Jesus,” he says, and fists his hands in his hair for a moment. God, when did all of this spiral so completely out of control? “Darcy, what the hell am I supposed to think when you come back from St. Patrick’s and you smell like you’ve been crying and you don’t mention it at all?”

“That’s—” Shit, of course he noticed that, and she’s been so tired lately she hadn’t thought about it, _shit,_ and of course he kept his mouth shut and pretended he hadn’t picked up on that because that’s what he always does, fucking hell _—_ “That doesn’t have anything to do with this, not really, I’m just tired—”

“Then what—”

“Did you ever think,” Darcy says, cracking, hands in fists at her sides, “that maybe I’m just as scared to lose you as you are to lose me, you _actual asshole?_ ”

Matt jerks like she’s punched him, and shuts his mouth. Darcy presses her hands to her face, trying to breathe, wiping her eyes and cursing under her breath. “For fuck’s sake, Matt.”

He’s actually wringing his hands. Or starting to, anyway. He clasps his fingers together, pulls them apart again. “Darcy—”

“ _Don’t_.” Her heart’s beating too fast, aching, twisting. “I know you wouldn’t—wouldn’t do anything like that, all right? Just—fucking hell. I know that.”

He wavers, and rubs a hand over the back of his neck. Darcy keeps pacing. _Fuck._ Fucking hell. When were things ever less than complicated? Not even at the start, not really, but _Christ. I’m too goddamn tired for this today._ She paces, back and forth, and Matt listens to her do it, not moving, just—waiting like there’s going to be a goddamn guillotine coming down on his neck any second, and she’s just— _God fucking dammit._

He could have not said anything about this, she thinks. Not just tonight, but not ever. He could have not mentioned it, and she would never have forgiven him for that, and they both know it. But this, on top of Frank, on top of the arraignment, on top of Karen, on top of whatever the fuck the yakuza are doing, on top of how her brain is determined, lately, to screw her over in the most excruciating, numbing way—she can’t think. She can’t _think_ , right now, she wants very badly to stop being able to think, because if she keeps thinking she’s actually going to shatter into pieces, because Christ, if she thinks, she can _see it_ , and that—fucking hell. It stings. It shouldn’t, but it stings like a scorpion, because it’s one thing to—to expect that, from a relationship, to go into it knowing that there might be times where things like this might happen, and it’s completely another to have it blindside her like this, to have the image sticking in her like this, stopping up her throat, strangling her voice away. 

Matt clears his throat. “Darcy—”

“ _Don’t._ ”

She paces for another minute, for two. Back and forth and back again.

“I’m sorry,” Matt says, very quietly. “It didn’t—mean anything. But I’m sorry.”

Shit. Darcy stops, presses the heels of her hands into her eyes. “I’m just—Matt, I’m _tired._ I’m so—so fucking tired. Of—of how fucking complicated this is, I can’t—I’m tired.”

Pain creases around his mouth. “I know.”

“Just—” Her eyes should not fucking hurt right now. She’s been awake way too long. “If I could just—cut my brain out, I would. Not because of this, but for all of it. I would.”

She wishes, all at once, that he’d reach out again, that she could lean on him and it’d be all right, but he’s still standing there in a mess of guilt. They shouldn’t feel like they’re on separate islands, she thinks. They shouldn’t. They were in the same place just five minutes ago, when did they wind up an ocean apart? “I’d prefer you not cut your brain out.”

“I’m just so, so sick of—of fighting,” she says, “with you,” and he settles into himself a little bit, the tension easing from around his jaw. Matt swallows.

“Yeah.”

Darcy coughs. Still, it eases the knot in her throat, just a little. “I’m not angry about the party,” she says. “Or I am, but—but I get it. There was that whole thing we did with the cops, way back when. It makes sense. Sometimes it’s just, you know. The only option.”

“This is different than that.” Matt clasps his hands together again. “I didn’t—we didn’t do anything, we just stood, nothing happened—”

“I know, Matt, it’s—I mean, I don’t know if I can say it’s _okay_ , it doesn’t—feel okay, at all, but logically I know nothing happened, all right? It was, you know.” She has to swallow. “Just a cover.”

Matt comes to an abrupt stop, and tips his head, and suddenly all the air’s been sucked out of the room. He’s listening to her, she thinks, just to her, and she has to press her tongue hard against the roof of her mouth to keep from swallowing, to pretend she can still breathe. She should be tired, she thinks. She should—she should be exhausted, too exhausted for this, but all at once she can’t breathe, she can’t twitch, she just wants to stand there and look at him, and she _does not like this._ She doesn’t like getting blindsided and she doesn’t like having to worry about this on top of everything and she really doesn’t like wandering round not knowing what’s happening when he could be getting knifed in the back on the other side of the city. She does _not._

“When I kissed you back,” he says, “in that alley, that was—that wasn’t just a cover.”

Christ. “I know that, Matt.” She clasps her elbows, prickling all over. “I—of course I know that.”

He takes one step, and then two, stops just beyond her reach, shatteringly still.

“You don’t have to prove anything about this,” Darcy says. “Not to me, anyway. It’s—it’s late, and we’re both exhausted, and I didn’t—I’m just tired. And frustrated. With everything. Everywhere.” She digs her nails into her skin. “You don’t have to prove anything.”  

Another step. Matt scuffs the backs of his fingers down the skin of her shoulder, her arm. Trailing smoke and sparks. “Yes,” he says. “I do.”

Her tongue won’t cooperate. Why won’t her tongue cooperate? “To me or to yourself?”

Matt ghosts his fingertips over the soft skin on the inside of her elbow, down over the fresh bandages (the cut aches, very faintly, more an echo than anything) to the veins in her wrist, lingering. “Both.”

She shuts her eyes. The next touch is over her collarbone, light and careful, circling the outlines of a bruise. “Both?”

He’s quiet for a long time, then, following the lines of her ones with his fingertips. “I used to think she was the only person who could understand,” he says. She almost can’t make out the words. “And that—it lingers. Habits. Like you said, old—old grooves. But that’s wasn’t true, not then and not now. I know that. I—” He stops. “I need to remember it.”

Her throat tingles, a little, when he traces the line of the tendons there. “Oh.”

Another touch, against the dip between her collarbones. “If there had been another option, I would have taken it.”

“I know.” She swallows, and her throat bobs against his fingertips. “It didn’t—it was a cover.”

“What happened tonight was a cover.” Another step. Her heart’s pounding, she can feel the warmth coming off him and there’s a smell to the borrowed shirt that’s almost like spice and under it is Matt, sharp edges in the air, and she wants to _bite_ him, in a way she hasn’t wanted to in days, weeks, since before their fight, since before all of it. “But it meant something, when I kissed you.”

“I know.”

“Do you?” He lifts a hand, and draws his thumb over the corner of her mouth. “Do you know why it took me so long, that night? To kiss you back?”

“I’m—uh.” There’s something rattling in her head, a thready _please please please_. It could be _please tell me_ or _please stop talking_ or _please let me just put my mouth on you and shut you up, Jesus Christ_ , but none of that will actually make it past her teeth. _Please just stop me from thinking, for—for five minutes._ “I mean. I kind of surprised you.”

There’s a flicker around his lips, half a smile. “Well, yes. But—” His thumb catches on her lower lip, sticks. “I didn’t want to start, because I knew if I did I might not be able to stop.”

 _Shit_. Why is it not possible to crawl into someone’s skin and live there? She wants to do that, right now. “I figured out I loved you,” she says. “When I kissed you.”

Matt makes an odd little sound, like she’s kicked him, and then they’re touching, her hands on his ribs and his fingers in her hair. Excruciatingly close, but he’s still just out of reach, lips barely brushing hers when he says, “I wanted to kiss you in the hospital when we went after Blake. And before that, when you said you knew you were safe with me. And before that, every time we were on the fire escape.”

“Matt—”

“Do you remember when we first signed the lease for the firm, after the realtor left, you turned and looked at me and you said _so this is ours now_ and I thought—Jesus. I thought I was going to explode. And that night I remember—” he touches his mouth very, very carefully to the space just beside her lips, too faint to feel, almost, aside from the heat, and the tickle of skin against hers “—you were in my clothes and you slept in my bed and it took everything I had not to climb in next to you and kiss you awake and never, ever stop—”

She snaps. Darcy fists her hand hard into the hair at the back of his head and she kisses him, less a kiss than a claim, pushing herself up onto her toes and crushing her mouth to his hard enough to sting. She used to think that maybe it would ease, a little, the wanting, especially after months of this, after nearly a year of it, but it hasn’t. And maybe it’s the aftermath of the fight, maybe it’s all the panic and the pain, maybe Elektra had had a point when she’d said _food or sex, no other option_ , maybe it’s her adrenalin or maybe it’s the fight or maybe it’s just this moment, but Christ, she feels rabid. She wants to claw her name into his skin. _Bad idea,_ she thinks, _such a bad idea, doing this right now, on top of everything,_ but she doesn’t want to think, anymore, she doesn’t want to be stuck on another island, she just _wants_ , and she can’t think of a good reason to stop.

Matt digs his fingers into her hips, tugs at her, and she doesn’t realize that he’s led them back to the couch until he’s pulled her down onto it, bracing her waist, dropping from her mouth to her collar and then to her breastbone, bare thanks to the tank top. Damp, and heat, and the drag of his teeth, and Darcy can’t help scratching him when she pushes him back and starts undoing the buttons on the dress shirt, settling with her knees against his hips and her mouth still caught with his, tangled, open and hungry. Not wine on his lips, she thinks, whiskey, expensive stuff they can’t usually get, and it sparks over her tongue as together they get the shirt off. She thinks it might wind up on the floor. She’s not certain. She’s kind of preoccupied with the catch of cloth over her glasses when her tank top vanishes and then the press of warmth and wet from his tongue on the skin between her breasts.

“You could’ve—ah.” She feels heavy, wild, drums bursting in her ribs when Matt mouths at her collar, at the hollow of her throat. “Could have said something about—”

“Up,” he says, more a growl than a word, and when she shifts up onto her knees he torques and turns and suddenly she’s flat on her back on the couch and he’s braced over her, curling his tongue into her mouth, a weight on her hips and on her legs and _god_ , she thinks she’s going to burst when she feels the hard press of his cock against her thigh.

“—all of that,” she finishes, and then she bites her tongue and tips her head back and whines high in the back of her throat, because his tongue’s pressed flat to her pulse and he’s hooked his fingers into the waistband of her boxers and she’s _burning_ , wet and flaming all at once. “Just saying, y’know, unless you tell me things—”

“I wanted you there.” Teeth on her chin, her jaw, her collarbone. Over the pulse in her throat. He shifts up, resettles his weight. “Tonight. I wanted you to be there.”

“Could’ve said—”

He strokes his thumbs over the peaks of her breasts and she chokes, arches her back. Pressure in her head and in her chest and she’s all fire, digging her nails in to hold him still. “I wanted you there,” he says, and it’s the Devil and it’s Matt and it’s the voice she only ever hears here, with his mouth on her skin, dragged out of him, grinding like stone. “I wanted you there, every second, I regretted it as soon as I shut the door to the limo, I kept thinking—”

He’s doing this on purpose, she thinks. She may or may not have a thing for his voice and he may or may not know this, but he gets _chatty_ when it’s like this, when she’s lost in sensation like this, like he’s completely let go of whatever control he has left and just says anything that comes into his head. He always speaks very clearly, low and carefully enunciated, hovering over hard Cs and Ks and Qs, pulling at the Ss like taffy, and it makes every scrap of skin on her body flush in a way that has her breathless. Darcy fists her hands up in his hair.

“—all those people there with shallow lives and shallow ideas and I kept picturing you next to me whispering about all of them, about how superficial and fake it all was, how ridiculous they were, and I kept laughing to myself thinking of what you would say—”

“Once blue collar, always blue collar,” she says, half-Lilith, and he laughs against the skin of her breast, laughs and dabs at her with his tongue and she presses up against his mouth and rocks her hips because _Jesus Christ, sometimes I could kill you for being this much of a tease_ —

“I wanted you there,” he says again, and the buzz of his voice over the thin skin around her nipple makes her yip something incomprehensible. “I wanted you there because I always want you there, because you make it—you make it easier, you make it better, I wanted you there with me—”

She is actually going to burst into flames if he keeps talking. “Jesus, Matt, will you just—”

“Not yet.” A thumb in the hollow of her hip, fingers splayed over her skin, slipping down, and he kisses her when she keens, swallows the sound, pressing one finger up into her and curving it in a way that makes her nearly combust. “Not yet, sweetheart, I’m not done yet, I need to tell you—”

“Jesus _Christ_ ,” she says, or tries to say, but she doesn’t really have a voice left. It comes out rasping, barely human. “Jesus fucking Christ—”

“I love you,” Matt says, still kissing her, drawing back just enough that his teeth catch on her lip. “So much, you have absolutely no idea, it scares me sometimes how much I need you but I don’t want to stop, I couldn’t if I tried—”

Another finger moving inside her, and then the press of his thumb just behind her clit, and Darcy can’t breathe. She pushes her hips up into his hand and only realizes after that she scores her nails down his arm in a way that leaves marks, because _fucking hell_ , she wants to crawl out of her own goddamn skin, wants to lick him all over until there’s nothing in her but this hazy, scorching ferality of _mine_ , _mine and mine and mine_. They haven’t come anywhere near this in weeks, not since before Frank cropped up, not since before Matt was shot, she’d been worried about his head and furious with him and everything had been so goddamn tangled, but now, Christ, it’s a low-rolling storm that’s finally shattered on the mainland. She bites him, because she has to do something, she can’t speak but she _has_ to do something, and when she puts her teeth and her tongue to the tendon between his shoulder and his throat and holds on, Matt makes that wonderful sound that she wants to bottle up and keep, a purring growl that’s all pleasure and wildness.

“I can’t do this without you,” he says, and traces his thumb in a circle. Sparks dance up her spine. Coals burn her tongue. “I don’t want to do this without you. I always want you there, with me, because neither of us are alone in the dark, Darcy, not anymore. And that’s never going to change, sweetheart, I’m not going to leave you alone in the dark again, because I still have no idea what I ever did to deserve you, but I can’t lose you, I can’t do this right without you—”

She’s close, though to what, she’s not sure. Darcy hooks her fingers into his hair, touching her thumb to his ear.

”I’ve been in love with you for eight years, Darcy, sweetheart, and I’m going to keep being in love with you for as long as I live, and after, no matter what happens, that’s always going to be true, it’s not ever, ever going to be a question—”

It’s the hard crack of the Q and the angle of his fingers and his thumb circling her clit and the press of his lips to her skin and the _words_ , God, the words, every bit at once, and all of a sudden— _screw you, Matthew, for being able to get me off this fast, seriously, screw you so much_ —she’s a supernova. It’s electricity all through her, a bursting, and she bares her throat and tips her head back and can’t even breathe, silent in the breaking, choking on air. Matt puts his lips to her throat, to her pulse, and says something against her skin she can’t make out over the rush. Darcy drops, and heaves a breath, in and out, her heart racing under her ribs and her nails cutting hard into the skin at the back of his head. He holds onto her through the aftermath, dropping little snowflake kisses onto the skin of her throat, over her shoulder, her collarbone, across freckles and bruises and fresh scars, a tender careful pattern that she can’t quite make sense of. She untwists her fingers, and pulls him up to her, kissing him, not quite desperate but not lazy, either, the kind of kiss that says _you idiotic, terrible, wonderful human being_ and _you tease too much_ and _I love you, I love you, I love you_ , staining it into the back of his throat.

“You make the most amazing goddamn noise,” he says, and catches her lower lip between his. “Right before you come. You make this noise like—God. And you arch your back and you’re _beautiful_ and it kills me every time, you have no idea—”

“I can guess,” she says, in a voice she hasn’t heard since before she quit smoking, rough and husky. Matt slips his tongue into her mouth, and the weight of him against her chest is crushing the air out of her. She can’t care. “You think you’ve proved your point yet?”

Matt rumbles against her throat. “Depends. Have you proved yours?”

“Did I have a point?”

He licks the hollow under her jaw, and it nearly sends her into spiraling overload, wet slickness on already buzzing skin. “Bit me pretty hard if you didn’t.”

“I always bite.” She can’t string the words together right. There are thousands in her head, right now. “Besides, you seem to like it.”

Matt smiles into her throat. “Mm.”

 _God, I don’t want to lose you._ Darcy nudges her fingers into his hair. “If you haven’t proved your point, y’know. More convincing might be nice. When I have legs.”

He lifts his head, shifts up onto his elbows so he can scuff against her collarbone again with the tip of his tongue. “I have legs.”

“Use them, then.” She puts her mouth very carefully to the raw divots her teeth left behind, as gentle as she can manage when there’s a ferocious kind of hunger racing in her bones. “Because if we’re going to keep doing that then I’d rather not hit my head on the arm of the couch.” 

Matt stills. Then he bites her clavicle with a low, rumbling hum, half a warning, half a reward. Darcy laughs. She can’t help it. She laughs, drawling, satisfied, because _this_ is Matt, all the shields dropped. This is the man she loves and the man who loves her, and that’s true as gravity. His fingers are wet against her skin when he heaves her up off the couch, one arm under her legs, mouth still on hers. “I love you,” and it’s a coil against her lips, a flicker of tongue. “I love you.”

“I love you,” she says, and nips at his ear. “Keep moving.”

“Where?”

“Bed.” She nips at him again, tugging on his earlobe. “Bed or shower or wall or whatever, I’m up for anything at this point so long as you keep moving, because as nice as that was I really, really want to fuck you.”

He hisses through his teeth, makes a noise in the back of his throat that has her toes curling. _Right track, then._ “Jesus, Darcy.”

“The bed maybe,” she says, and she’s still kind of soupy, still whirling in her head, but she’s never really had to think when she talks, anyway. “And you can have me touch or not, I’ll keep my hands to myself if you want so you don’t overload but Christ, Matt, sometimes it’s hard not to touch you when you’re in me and all I can think or smell or feel or taste is you—”

“ _Jesus_ ,” he says again, and she thinks he might actually lose his grip on her. “Jesus Christ—”

“Bed or the wall,” she says, “though I’d prefer the bed because it would mean I would have something to hold onto when you use that famous silver tongue of yours and get me off that way because I fucking love it when you do that, it’s like you’re peeling me to pieces—”

“Fucking _hell_ ,” Matt says, guttural, undone, and she’s really, really glad that the bedroom door’s open, because otherwise they probably really would have ended up against the wall, and bare skin on brick is not exactly comfortable. She loves making him swear, though. “Shit—”

“—and if we do use the shower then I can do what I always want to do and just—” She drags her tongue along the skin in front of his ear. “—everywhere, all over, and I’ll come out smelling like you and I know that drives you crazy, Matt, because I can see it on your face when it happens, how much it drives you absolutely _insane_ to have me smell like you—”

“Darcy—”

“—and it drives me crazy, too,” she says, and licks him again, because she can, because he tastes like salt and because every word she says has him clenching his hand tighter against her legs and she doesn’t want him letting go. “Because I love smelling like you, and I know you know that, it’s like you’re in my skin and I can’t scrub you out and I don’t _want_ to, I love how you smell, it’s—” _home_ , she thinks, and _want_ , and _love_ , all of it at once, but she can’t say that, not without sounding silly “—do you have any idea how hot it is for me to know that you’re all over me and no one but you and I can tell, when you sit there with a look on your face like you want to eat me alive in front of everyone and more than half the time I want you to—”

“ _Christ_.” They’d be in the bed by now, she thinks, at normal speed, but she thinks he might be dragging it out just so he can listen to her talk. Or try to keep his balance. “Darcy, for God’s sake—”

“I always want to be able to smell you on me.” She bites down on his ear again, gentler, traces the curve with her tongue. “On my clothes and in my hair and on my skin, so I can carry you everywhere, so I can always have you with me, because God, Matt, you have no fucking clue how much I love you—”

He clocks into the bed, and drops her onto the blankets. She’s only bounced and landed once—laughing, again, because the look on his face right now, that’s _exactly_ the look she’d been talking about, like he wants to start at her feet and put his mouth on every goddamn inch of her—by the time he follows her, shoes off, crashing against her mouth and pushing her back into the mattress, bare skin and scars.

She does sleep, eventually. Dozes on and off. She’s probably on the third cycle of opening her eyes, looking at the clock, and shutting them again to fall into nightmares when she finally works up the courage to say, “I wanted you there, too. At the hotel, tonight.”

Matt’s fingertips go still on her back. Then he goes back to his sketching, tracing up and down her spine in a loop that’s heartbeat-steady. 

“It feels like—” she stops. “Everything’s so out of control. We’re—we’re in the middle of half a dozen mysteries that don’t seem to have any starting points. And when Kate and I were in the hotel, and I heard the yakuza woman talking about the Yakatomi Building, I thought, _Christ, I wish I was there_. Or I wish you were in the hotel. One of the two, I couldn’t—I couldn’t pick it apart. And even before then, as soon as the limo pulled away I thought, _not again._ Not that you were leaving with Elektra, that didn’t have anything to do with it, just that—that you were gone, suddenly. And I still wanted you there. I don’t want to lose track of this.” 

He shifts under her, puts his mouth to her hair. “Mm.”

“I can’t lose you, either.” Darcy folds her arms up, rests her chin on them so she can look at him, so she can drown in the angles of his face. “Not to anything, all right? Not to a gun or to a knife or to the dark or to anything.” _Not to yourself,_ she thinks. “And it doesn’t have a thing to do with what happened tonight, when I say that. I just can’t lose you. I can’t—not to anything, Matt.”

Matt presses his lips together. He doesn’t say anything, just cups his hand to her face, strokes his thumb down her cheek, over her mouth. Darcy rests her cheek to his chest again, the air conditioner blowing chill air over the bare skin of her back, and falls asleep to the curl of his fingers, back and forth over her spine, pausing over her heart every single time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Yoku kiiteru? Kakushite. Matte. Shizuka ni shite. Sou ittan deshou? Kono youna bakana koto shitara kakushitenain da._ Are you listening? Hide. Wait. Stay quiet. That's what I said, isn't it? If you do stupid shit like this, you're not hiding. 
> 
> _Kankei nai. Kamawanai. Urusaitteba! Mou juubun da yo. Yamenasai. Konkai wa omaera no saigo no chansu da, Souchi._ That's irrelevant. I don't care. God, shut up! You've done more than enough, stop. This time is your last chance, Souchi.
> 
>  _Yametoke. Konna koto ni--_ Just stop. This sort of--
> 
>  _Nanimo shinaide. Chotto matte. Hai, moshi moshi._ Don't do anything. Wait just a sec. Yes, hello? 
> 
> _Kashikomarimashita. Hai, wakkata. Ima kuru yo. Nandakedosa, bishoppu no biru no koto--aa. Mondai ga aru sou da. Ahagon ni yoru to dareka--hai. Ima anmari abunakunai kedo sa. Hontou ni daijoubu ka? Hitori de. Un. Yakatomi made kurun dakedo--_ Understood. Yes, I understand. I'm coming now. But there's something going on with the Bishop building--yeah. Seems like there's a problem. According to Ahagon, someone's--yes. Though it's not particularly dangerous right now. Are you really okay alone? Yeah. I'm coming to Yakatomi right now, but--
> 
> (Okay, with this it's very important to note that she drops from very formal with _kashikomarimashita_ to highly informal with shit like _un, kurun, dakedo, kedo sa,_ etc. Depending on who you talk to in Japanese, you contract and shorten verbs, nouns, etc. She goes from highly formal to highly informal very fast, and that speaks to the relationship she has with the person she's talking to. When she's talking to Souchi Ahagon, she's very much the dominant speaker, and talking down to him. Just as a linguistic FYI.)


	12. One Step Forward, Three Back

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: some PTSD stuff, discussion of what happened to Darcy when she was being interrogated by Nobu, some discussion of Maya's deafness and social isolation resulting from her father attempting to hide it (I'm going off of the comics more than anything with this, but...yeah, it's gross, guys, I'm very sorry), and some knives and arguments. 
> 
> THANK YOU, ELEKTRA. THANK YOU. FINALLY.
> 
> NOTE: I have been researching the Northern Cheyenne and the economic situations in Lame Deer and surrounding areas, but if anything I say is offensive, please let me know and I will change it immediately. I haven't been able to find anyone to look at it, unfortunately, so if anyone of Native heritage reading this would like to offer assistance (which you are not obligated to do so, obviously) I would really, really appreciate it.

Foggy exaggerates.

Or, well, he’s not. Technically, the People vs. Frank Castle sort of starts the next week, but only in prep. No matter how hard Reyes pushes, there are only so many things that can be fast-tracked, and putting paperwork through the New York justice system is a fucking nightmare, even if you’re the District Attorney. Things have to be processed, and catalogued, and reorganized, and ledgers have to be cleared, and schedules have to be rearranged, and apparently in Reyes’s mind all the evidence files have to be mixed so thoroughly that Karen might just tear all her pretty hair out of her skull before the jury selection even starts.

“People hate him or love him,” Angie says in a low voice, when Darcy stops by on the Friday after the Yakatomi party, delivering coffee and a request of _maybe files that aren’t so messed with, please, Huang?_ On Angie’s shoulder, Hei Hei is picking through his tail fur with his fingertips. The bald spot has mostly grown over. “Castle. They hate him or they love him, and either way it means people feel a whole damn lot. The three of you are gonna have your work cut out for you, peregrine. You and the pigeon and the robin. ‘specially when it comes to juries.”

“Not Reyes?”

“Miss Reyes,” says Angie, “would probably take the first twelve anti-Castle jurors to walk in the door.”

“Well, that’s totally not worrying at all.”

Angie sucks her teeth. On her shoulder, Hei Hei makes a little monkey noise, and starts pulling on her earlobe. “She’s been on everyone’s ass since the toucan left. Which, by the way? Has fucked the dynamic of the whole office. Nobody knows how to do shit without her.” She strokes her fingers down Hei Hei’s back. “Some people’re wondering if they should copy her.”

Truesmith wanders by, talking on his cell phone. Darcy waits until he passes, leans her elbows on Angie’s desk and lowers her voice. “What, and resign?”

“Most of ‘em are too scared of Reyes to try it, but they’ve been talking.” Angie doesn’t look at her. “Woodpecker’s been trying to pick up the slack, but there’re only so many things that he can manage, and not having the toucan here’s a problem for a lot of people. They think, y’know, if _she_ left, what the hell is going on with the DA’s office?”

Hei Hei clambers off of Angie’s shoulder to steal a piece of cut mango that Angie’s left out on her desk. Juice dribbles onto a file marked _fuck this_. Darcy shifts it gently out of the way so nothing stains. “I’m gonna go check on her tomorrow. You want me to tell her something?”

Angie scowls at a clerk of court who comes too close. Darcy’s not entirely sure if there’s a story there, or if Angie’s just being her well-known, terrifying self, but the clerk actually almost loses his grip on his travel mug, and books it as fast as he can in the other direction without looking like he’s running. The look on Angie’s face is pure disdain, and Darcy has to bite her tongue to keep from laughing. After the clerk’s scuttled, Angie says, “Tell her if she still wants to do that thing, I’d come.”

Darcy blinks. “Thing?”

“Yes, thing.”

“What thing?”

She scowls again. “A none of your business thing.”

“You know I hate secrets, Angie.”

“Whatever, peregrine. Toucan’ll know what I’m talking about.” Angie clicks her tongue, and Hei Hei winds back up around her neck again. “Go away, you’re an eyesore. Even if you’re not bruised to shit this time, that cut is fucking awful and I don’t want to look at it.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Darcy says, and salutes as she backs away.

She calls Kate on her way to the train station, because they’re on day five of Kate Bishop being cooped up in Clint Barton’s apartment, and Katie isn’t handling it all that well. (“I’m bored. I can only hit the bull’s eye on the dartboard so many times. And Clint’s place smells like socks.” “Yeah, well, that’s what you get when the yakuza want to use a staple gun on your face, young lady, stay there.” “You’re an asshole and I don’t like you.” “Don’t be cute, D’Artagnan.”) “Do me a favor, check in on the tenement for me? I haven’t heard from Elena in a couple of days.”

“Not from Miles either?”

“Miles says it’s fine,” Kate says, _umeboshi_ sour. “But Miles also might be doing that thing that guys think they have to do where they lie because they want to take care of it before anything goes wrong.”

“Miles didn’t strike me as the patronizing type.”

“Would you just check for me? I’m going stir-fucking-crazy and I trust you more than I trust Miles. Besides, you heard what the Yakuza Lady said. The Ahagons were supposed to back off, I can’t know if they actually did without someone going in and looking.”

Darcy stops at the stairwell down into the subway. “Are you telling me to harass your tenants, Katie?”

“Fuck no, I want you to break into their apartment and steal whatever noisemakers are in there.” She scoffs. “Don’t do that, that’s stupid.”

“I’m not breaking into the Ahagons’ apartment, and you’re clearly going a bit insane if you’re asking me to.” There are too many people wandering the stairs. She crosses back, leans against a lamp post and looks up at the sky. Clouds like cotton floss blaze through the blue, high winds far above ground level. “How’s your surveillance gig going?”

“You mean the bugs?” Kate makes a farting noise. “I mean, she’s not in the hotel room very often. She’s called Kim a few times, talked about like—the ledger, about who stole it. The accountant that Matt and the Daughter of the Demon’s Head—”

“You’re never going to let go of the Batman jokes, are you.”

“No, because they’re amazing, and you know it, Selina.” She makes another rude noise. “The accountant Bruce and Talia al-Ghul stole the keycard from, Stan Gibson, she mentioned him last night. I think they have something on him, she said something like, _he won’t go against us while we have all his cards_ , but, y’know, in Japanese idioms instead. Have you ever tried explaining an idiom to someone who doesn’t speak the native language? It’s kind of difficult.”

“So they’re blackmailing Stan Gibson?”

“Or they have a guillotine over his head and twitchy fingers on the lever.” Kate hums for a little bit. “Hey, who are we out of the Les Amis de l’ABC?”

“Since when do you know _Les Misérables?_ ”

“Since I read it,” Kate says. “Clint was using it as a doorstop. It was big and had small print and took up a lot of time. That was maybe day two. Plus I saw the movie with Anne Hathaway and Amanda Seyfried. Day four.”

“I’m sure Victor Hugo appreciates that it was being used as a doorstop.”

“This is Clint we’re talking about. I don’t know why he even has it.” 

A half a dozen feet down the sidewalk, a man in an expensive suit steps off the curb into a puddle. He swears, and shakes his foot like it’s going to do anything to fix it. “Just don’t make me Marius.”

“Nah, Marius doesn’t count, he lives. Besides, you’re Combeferre.” There’s a _thunking_ sound. “Look, bull’s eye again. You’re Combeferre, Matt’s Enjolras, Foggy’s Courfeyrac, and Karen’s either Jehan or Bahorel, I can’t decide. I’m not sure who I am.”

“Let’s be real here, you’re Bahorel, not Karen.” Darcy chews on her cuticle. “You disturb me with all your parallels. Literally every single one of these people die.”

“I can’t help it. I like making lists. It’s soothing.” Another thunk. “Bull’s eye on the fucking dart. I think I might be better than Clint by now.”

“How are the papers coming along?”

“I haven’t heard anything from Yoko. Apparently some of it is in that same code that the ledger is. The medical stuff, mostly. Like—all the reports. The building plans she translated, though.” Kate’s voice drops. “They want my building so they can rip up the inside and dig a huge fucking hole in the basement.”

 _Wait. Come again?_ “Did she translate it right?”

“She checked it three times. No other plans. Just—rip everything out of the inside, and dig. And when I say a huge hole, I mean like—a _huge_ hole. Huge and deep. I’d kind of be concerned about the structural integrity of the building if they did it, a strong wind might knock the whole thing down once you tear through the foundation.” A third thunk. “Fuck.”

“What are you even doing?”

“I keep sticking the darts on top of each other. Two of them just fell. Lucky—no, Lucky, don’t lick those, you know better than to lick anything in here, idiot beast.”

“I kind of wonder if Rey and Lucky would get along.”

“Probably. All Lucky ever wants to do is like—fall asleep on you. And eat pizza. One nice thing about being here, I get all his attention without Clint being a possessive canary.” Another sigh. “So, yeah. If you could look in at the tenement and make sure that the basement isn’t a gigantic hole, then I would appreciate it. I’m kind of worried about it.”

“I’ll check, for sure. I think Elena and Miles would have noticed some backhoes coming in to rip up the foundation, though.”

“Very funny,” Kate says. “Much cute. Sass amaze.”

“Maybe she’s born with it.”

“Fuck you,” she says, fond. “I’m gonna take a nap.”

“Fuck you too,” says Darcy, and hangs up. The guy who stepped in the puddle shouts a swearword at a cab that passes his ass by, and turns up the road. She fumbles her subway pass out of her wallet, and clatters down the stairs into the station.

Yes, okay, she’s supposed to go and check on the tenement, but work comes first. And this is actual work, not the minefields of the yakuza, or the unanswered question of the Irish. (They haven’t seen anyone, the past few nights. No Irish at all. Still, she’s pinned the note up to the hidden bits of the whiteboard in her office. If Brannigan is looking into Daredevil and Lilith, still, then that means something’s going to happen, and it probably won’t be pretty.) It’s not even Frank work, which is a travail in and of itself. (Frank’s fault, she’ll insist this until her dying day, because she _gets_ the complexity of it all but _for Christ’s sake, man, work with me here_ —) This is Marisol, and clean stuff, normal stuff, stuff she can do in her sleep pretty much, and she needs clean, normal things right now. She’s had too many things go terribly inverted lately to not crave something simple.

She has good news today, at least. The Manhattan School of Music has finally agreed to meet with them to discuss the suit. “It means,” Darcy says, after Marisol’s doctored her coffee to her liking and set herself up with her hands folded on the tabletop in Mug Shots, “that we can probably bully them into paying out, so long as they don’t contest any of the suits.”

“What if they do?”

 _God, I really hope they don’t._ She has more than enough on her plate at the moment. “Then we nag them until they figure out that firing this racist asshat is probably the best thing for everyone involved.” And also make them pay out, because reasons. She’s calculated it out, and if MSM pays for every case she’s throwing at them—close to twelve, now—then that’s enough to deal with their electricity bill. Not anything else, but the electricity bill, at least. She’s kind of surprised that twelve of the people who’d come to talk to her are still clinging on, but for some reason the Castle case hasn’t scared them off, yet. She’s pretty sure that’s because of Marisol, and she doesn’t know how to say thank you for that without making things awkward. “They want to talk about it, though. It’s a good thing. Means there’s a dialogue instead of a brick wall.”

Marisol stirs more sugar into her coffee, and stares out the window.

“You okay?” says Darcy. Marisol doesn’t look away from the window until Darcy says it again, taps her fingers against Marisol’s side of the table. Then she jumps, and blinks, owlish, her earrings swaying against her neck. “You didn’t hear me at all, did you?”

“I’m thinking,” Marisol says, and clears her throat. “Sorry.”

“Are you all right? You look like you have a headache.”

“I’m fine.” Mairsol shakes her head. “Just—I’ve been working long hours.”

“For the orchestra?”

Her lips thin out. “Among other things. It’s been—complex. Lately.”

“Tell me about it,” Darcy says, and throws her pen onto the table. She rubs her eyes. “Are you okay?”

“Are you allowed to ask me that, as my attorney?”

“As your attorney, no, but as a concerned citizen? I’m obligated. You look like Eeyore.”

“Hah,” says Marisol. Her lips curve up, though. She swipes her thumb along the rim of her mug. “I’m—”

She stops.

“Is it about the case?” Darcy bites the inside of her cheek. “About your father?”

“Sort of.” She lets out a breath. “I don’t—it’s a little personal.”

“Ah,” says Darcy. She fusses with her papers. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.”

“I’ve already told you about my murdered father,” says Marisol. “I don’t think there’s exactly a boundary, anymore. At least, in some ways.”

“Yeah, but that was different.” She plops the files back onto the table, and curls her hands around her coffee mug. It’s almost the end of September, now, which means it’s getting just cool enough for her hands to do the stupid bad-circulation-chill thing. The scar doesn’t help matters. Since Nobu, her left hand always gets colder than the right. “You were asking for help, and I—wasn’t really all that helpful.”

“It wasn’t fair of me to ask you that,” Marisol says. She turns her mug between her hands. “I mean, not really. This is the first time in fifteen years I’ve felt like I have a chance to understand what could have happened, and I—it was unfair of me to expect that from you when I’m sure the whole thing with Daredevil and Lilith is the last thing you want to think about.”

 _Hah. If only._ “I took a look at some of the files myself, but—I mean, it’s been fifteen years. There’s not a lot left to find. Most of the men mentioned in those files are either dead or missing or both, and—I mean. I’ve been kind of busy.”

“You looked?” Marisol blinks. “I—didn’t think you would.”

“What, and let you flounder on your own when I have my oh-so-secret connections at the police department?” She wrinkles her nose. “Nah. I snuck a peek at some of the files, made a mind map and everything. It’s just—complicated. Even in a year the landscape changes, crime-wise. Fifteen—you’re kind of screwed. There’s a reason most cold cases don’t get closed.”  

“I know.” Marisol’s phone buzzes. She taps at the screen, swypes out a text. The screen’s angled wrong for Darcy to see what she’s typing, but it’s short. “There’s a reason I haven’t gone back to the police with this. They’ve already told me most of that.”

“Yeah.” She splays the pages between her fingers, like she’s dealing cards. “Is there like—can I ask you about your dad? What do you remember about him?”

“Like what kind of person he was?”

“No, more like—” She nips at her tongue. “I mean, it’s—weird. Regardless of who he was really working for—though just judging from the cases that have been linked to his name, I’m gonna have to say it was Don Rigoletto, he was big in the Maggia until Fisk came in and took over—I don’t see any reason why they’d call him out from Montana over and over again to do clean-up when there are more than enough people in the city already who would have been willing to do it. Especially fifteen years ago. Bringing someone all the way out from ranch country is—specific.”

Marisol’s chin goes stiff. “I mean, yes. But I was nine, I don’t particularly remember much. And he was very private.”

“And I get that, seriously, like—the most I remember from before I turned ten, aside from like…getting stung by wasps or whatever is just a lot of blurry images. Not anything major. But if you can think of anything that might give me a clue as to why people were calling in your dad, as opposed to like—Joe Schmoe from three blocks down to clean things up, it would help. Or at least give me something else to go on than what the NYPD already has, which, because he was good at his job, is basically bupkis.”

Marisol picks at the edge of her cuticle for a little bit, staring at the table. Her forehead crumples up. “Darcy. Are you asking if my father was a mutant?”

“Not exactly.” _But yeah, exactly, because I really don’t see what it could be otherwise. Unless the guy had some major pull in the money circuit. Or someone owed him their balls in a Ziploc._ “Just—any special skill. The X-gene could be one, but, I mean. I know people who can tie cherry stems into knots with their tongue and like—sketch the alphabet out in cheerios with their eyes closed, people have weird shticks sometimes. Not that either of those things is comparable with being a guy who cleans up after the Maggia, but sometimes people surprise you.”

There’s a bit of blood welling at the base of Marisol’s nail. “Not that I’m aware of,” she says. “My father was away a great deal, I don't—remember him very well at all. If he did have some kind of ability, I wouldn't be the one to know about it.”

 _Oh._ Darcy catches herself rubbing a hand over her jaw, and quits. She needs to stop picking up Matt’s weird physical habits, it’s not helpful and Foggy just mocks her. “Anything at all you can give me might be helpful, Marisol.”

Marisol tips away from her, into the wall. “What do you know about Lame Deer?”

“You mean the city? I’ve been looking into that online. There’s not a whole lot I found, but there was some stuff released by the BLM about like—economics. Some history. The energy boom in the seventies and eighties, the litigation with the coal mining industry, declining employment rates. Discussion of current socioeconomic issues. But that’s sociological stuff, not—not personal.”

“I don’t think I’d be able to confirm the accuracy anyway,” Marisol says. “Like I said, I didn’t see anyone, really. Except doctors, and I think the only reason my father could afford to take me to all the doctors he did was because of the work he did in New York.” She sets her teeth in her lower lip. “If my father hadn’t taken the jobs he did here in the city, I don’t—know if I would be alive, or if I would still be on the reservation. I don’t know if he would have had a job at all. The system itself is—set up to fail. And it’s difficult for me to remember anything that happened before I found him dying, to be completely honest. But I think, maybe—”

She stops.

“What?”

“It wouldn’t surprise me.” Marisol spins her ring on her finger. “If he had some kind of ability, it wouldn’t surprise me. But I’m sorry, I don’t remember any of it very well.”

“Dude, you’re fine. Regardless of whether or not you were sick, trauma can mess things up. Especially when you’re a kid. Just—” _Eli, and blood on a kitchen floor_ “—little things get blacked out. Don’t worry about it.”

Marisol doesn’t smile, but her lips do curve a little. She turns her ring again.

“I don’t know if anyone will be able to find more than this,” Darcy says. “Not without breaking and entering or like—new evidence coming forward. A new witness. The police files were also pretty wrecked when aliens decided to land on a lot of this neighborhood, so who knows. There could be clues we’ve missed just because they don’t exist anymore.”

“That’s why I wanted to ask Daredevil and Lilith.” Marisol turns her face away. “I have—issues with their methods. I mean, I think anyone sane has issues with their methods. But they’re in a position to ask that no one else is. If anyone can find anything out about what happened to my father out here, they can. I’m sure of it.”

Darcy doesn’t quite know what to say.

“I’ve been trying to find them in other ways,” Marisol says. “Not on Twitter, but—other ways. I talked to a reporter I thought might know them, but he turned me down too. I’m getting to a point where I’m considering just—wandering around Hell’s Kitchen hoping to run into them. But even that’s complicated, for—for a lot of reasons.”

“The Kitchen’s dangerous after dark.”

“I can take care of myself,” says Marisol. Her smile’s hooked at one corner, and sharp. “That’s not the problem. I just—don’t think a friend of mine would approve of me wanting to talk to them about my father’s death.”

“Do they not like vigilantes?”

“Not particularly, no. She has an interesting history with the concept.” Marisol gives her a lingering look, and then says, “Her fiancé is in prison. He’s—I guess you could call him another dad, in some ways. Or an uncle, I guess. The Guerras work for him, and he was—always around after my dad died. Helped me a lot. So yeah, like another dad, to me. Which I guess kind of makes her more of a stepmom than a friend, but I don’t think about it too much.”

“Ah.”

She sips at her coffee. “She knows I’m trying to find the pair of them, and she’s not—she doesn’t not approve, she just thinks I should be doing things differently than I am.”

“What, with trying to talk to them?”

A deep, deep sigh. “No. She thinks it’s a waste of time. Which I don’t, but that’s me. It’s just—tricky, trying to balance things, that’s all.” Marisol looks into her coffee, and falls quiet. She steals a look at Darcy. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to ramble.”

“It’s fine.” Darcy reaches out across the table, squeezes her arm. “I can promise you that if I run into them for any reason—which I probably won’t, but I live in their stomping ground, y’know, could happen—I’ll let them know to find you. That much at least I can do.”

Marisol’s mouth curves. She curls her fingers over Darcy’s, and lets go. “Thanks.”

“Of course.”

Darcy’s flicked the folder open again and started going over the details, gathering her thoughts, when Marisol says, “Can I ask you something? About Fisk.”

Darcy bites her tongue. “Marisol, I can’t—”

“It’s not about the case.” Marisol twists another ring, this one on her thumb. “I’ve read the transcripts of the DA’s case against him. You guys—I mean, all of you testified. And before that, you had your suit with that woman, Mrs. Cardenas, so I get—I get that you can’t talk about that. Just—I was thinking about all the things that he did, how all of it was part of a plan he had to clean up Hell’s Kitchen, clean up the city, and I just—wondered how you felt about him. Or what you thought.”

“About Fisk?”

She twists the ring all the way round. “Mm.”

Darcy only realizes she’s rubbing at the scar on her palm when Marisol’s eyes slide to it, and stay there. She presses both hands down on the tabletop, but it doesn’t do anything to hide the mark. _Warped mirrors._

“You read the papers,” she says. “You—what do you know about what happened to my firm?”

Marisol shrugs. “Karen Page was nearly assassinated by a man hired by Union Allied. Eventually it came out that Union Allied was working for Fisk, as were the Goodmans, who had you beaten in an alleyway.” She stumbles over it, meeting Darcy’s eyes. “There was a police report filed that said you were taken and—and threatened. But that was much more difficult to find. The account was very sparse.”

“You mean the account was destroyed by people Fisk had inside the department. I’m surprised any of that survived at all.”

“I’m stubborn,” Marisol says. “I ferret things out.”

The scar itches. “I was—yes, I was threatened,” Darcy says. “By a man who worked for Wilson Fisk. At that table, actually. In the window.”

Marisol turns, and looks at the table. There’s a couple sitting there, a man and a woman, probably a first date judging by how loud the laughter is. Nerves. She turns back. “I—didn’t know that.”

“I can’t sit at that table,” Darcy says. “It’s—it’s not that I don’t like to, I can’t. If I get near it, I remember—” Words stick, and fly away. “His name was James Wesley. It was a fake name, apparently. People have never found any records of a James Wesley anywhere in the United States that meet his description. But it was how I knew him, and how—how Fisk did, I think. He was Fisk’s right-hand man, he—he solved his problems for him. When we started looking into—into Union Allied, into the Goodmans, I…became a problem.”

Marisol is stony quiet.

“I mean, obviously it was all of us, not just me, but—but I made the Goodmans nervous. And then, you know, when they had me attacked, Daredevil—” She threads her fingers together on the tabletop, fidgeting. “—he, um. Stopped them from doing whatever else they might have planned on doing. And Wesley heard about it.”

“Wesley was murdered,” says Marisol, in an odd voice. “Wasn’t he? I remember someone—mentioned it in the transcripts. The murderer was never found.”

 _I killed him,_ Karen says in her head. _He’s dead, I killed him, he’s dead._ “He—that was later.” Darcy lifts her chin towards the window. She’s fading, sinking, falling away into memory. “Wesley came in one day, while I was sitting at that table. He said—he said that if I didn’t tell him how to find the devil, or who he was, then he would—” She stops. “That something terrible would happen to me.”

Marisol’s eyes drop back to Darcy’s hand, a flicker of an instant.

“I didn’t have an answer to give him,” Darcy says. _Not then, not ever._ “I didn’t—couldn’t answer him.”

“You could have lied to him.”

“I could have.” She’s thought about it since. Could have lied to him, could have told him some fake name, made up a story and crept into Fisk’s inner circle to dismantle it from the inside. She’s thought about it, but no, it wouldn’t have worked. Wesley had been too smart, and she— _I wouldn’t have been able to carry that off for very long._ She’s not sure they wouldn’t have smelled her out from the start, considering the photographs of her with Matt on her fire escape. Yet another piece of evidence that disappeared in the wake of Wesley’s death. _Where, is the question, is the nauseating, world-shaking question._ “I’m—I was scared out of my mind and there was a sniper aimed at me from across the street, it wasn’t really a great time to think through my options.”

Marisol’s whole face changes, though into what, Darcy can’t say. She turns, looks at the window again, at the buildings across the busy street. When she turns back around, there’s a scratching kind of smile on her mouth. Her voice is hushed. “What happened?”

“I thought you would have read that part.”

“I only know what I told you.”

“I don’t like talking about it.”

“You went over it in court.”

“Yeah, because I had to.” _And even then I lied about it._ “I was under oath, as a witness and a victim. I don’t like to talk about it if I don’t need to.” She scrapes her nail into her scar. “Just like you don’t talk about your dad.”

Marisol shuts up. The scratching smile is thinning, shrinking, until it’s just barely an angle to her mouth, just a hint of a warning.

“Why do you want to know what I think of Fisk?” Darcy says. “He’s in jail. He’s not getting out anytime soon. He doesn’t matter anymore, no matter how badly he messed this place up. We pick up and move on. Lingering on him, letting him into your head, into anyone’s head, it—it doesn’t help.”

Marisol flares her fingers out over the tabletop like she’s playing piano. “You’re an attorney. You—you know that there are times when the law doesn’t do anything, when there’s nothing to be done. Fisk made a lot of mistakes, but maybe—maybe the core of what he was trying to do wasn’t necessarily bad. The same thing Daredevil and Lilith are trying to do, maybe.”

“It’s not,” Darcy snaps. “It’s nowhere close.”

“I don’t see much of a difference.”

She never, ever thought she’d be having this conversation again. “Fisk didn’t want to save the city, he wanted to own it. He was so convinced that he was the only person who could fix everything—” _and doesn’t that sound familiar, Kid Flash_ “—that he was willing to do whatever it took to put himself into control. He’d have sacrificed anything and everything to manage it. Whatever justice you’re looking for, Marisol, you—you wouldn’t have found it through Fisk. All he ever did was—was lie, and cut, and kill, and maim, and _burn._ ”

“But—”

“You want to know what they did to me?” Her lungs are out of control. “You want to know what happened? I want you to—to imagine waking up on the floor of a warehouse with numb feet and your wrists and ankles tied and a paint rag shoved into your mouth to keep anyone from hearing you scream. I want you to try and imagine what it’d be like to be duct-taped to a chair by the same people who’d tried to have your friends murdered and knowing that you were probably going to die and not be able to do a damn thing about it. Think how it would feel to know that you mattered so little to those people, as a human being, that—that Wesley was playing Angry Birds while you screamed.”

Across the table, Marisol flinches, badly. _Stop,_ a voice whispers in her head, _stop,_ but Darcy can’t stop, and Marisol can’t look away from her, and it’s a stalemate.

“I want you to imagine it,” she says. “And I want you to—to picture, just— _try_ to picture what it would be like to have Wilson Fisk stand there, and look at you, and say that you’re there as bait. That you were hurt, and nearly killed, not just because you were in the way, but because you were nothing more than a—than a worm. On a hook. Like in fishing. To catch bigger prey. To—to let him kill someone who saved your life.”

Marisol’s lips have gone bloodless. Her nails are digging into her wrist. Darcy gives in, and draws her thumb along the scar, over and over. _Nobu,_ she thinks. _Fisk._

“That’s how I feel about Wilson Fisk. That’s what I think of him. A—a spider in the middle of a web. A chess player. A man who—people aren’t _people_ to him. They’re—they’re numbers, Inconsequential. Their fear, their—their problems, their lives, none of it meant a damn thing to him. He tore a man’s head off with a car door, Marisol. He tried to have an old woman knifed for no reason other than she was in the way. He—he’s murdered hundreds of people, him or one of his people in his name, over more than fifteen years of trying to get his goddamn dream off the ground. I think he’s a monster, and a very big part of me wishes he was dead.” Her cheeks are damp, and she can’t remember when they wound up that way, can’t remember feeling it start or even trying to fight it off. Darcy wipes her face with the back of her hand. “Was that what you wanted to know?”

Marisol doesn’t say a word. She sits there, in silence, and to Darcy’s horror there’s a sheen to her eyes that’s all tears. “I shouldn’t have asked.” She curls her hands up into fists on the table, and pushes away from it. “I’m sorry.”

“Marisol—”

Marisol turns away. “I need—I’m sorry. I need to think. I’m—”

She trembles in place, for a moment. Then she’s out, slamming out of Mug Shots and turning down the street, her ponytail bouncing against the back of her neck. The same barista from last time lifts her eyebrows at Darcy, making a _how could you do that to your girlfriend_ face, and Darcy shakes her head once and tugs napkins from the dispenser with shaking fingers. Things are spinny, uncomfortable. Her stomach’s knotted down to an acorn, sickly yellow nausea and the poison ivy of Lilith all tangling together up her throat. She looks at the tear spots on the paperwork for a minute, for two, and then hits one on speed dial.

“What’s up?” He’s distracted, she’s pretty sure. It sounds like Foggy’s talking to himself again; the echo of voices over the connection is a rumble in the distance, like thunderclouds. “Forget something?”

Darcy’s quiet, just for a second. It’s enough.

“Sweetheart, what’s wrong?” Matt says, very softly, and she shakes her head.

“Nothing.” She’s lying, and he’d know it even without hearing her heart, just because of the way it catches on her tongue, how she throws it away. “Just—you know when bad dreams keep chasing you into reality and you can’t shake them off?”

Silence, aside from Foggy talking to the wall. Then: “Yeah.”

“I don’t—I’m okay. Can you talk to me?” She wipes at her eyes again. “Just for a little bit. Please.”

“What about?”

“Nothing to do with any of it,” she says. “Not—not Frank or the Irish or any of the rest of it. Just—something else.”

Silence again. She hears a chair scrape, a door close. Probably the one into their office, or into the conference room, who knows. Matt clears his throat. “I meant to tell you this morning and forgot,” he says. “The lady in the apartment below us was replaying _TrishTalk_ last night and Trish mentioned you.”

Her eyes hurt. “Really?”

“It was oblique, but she did. You probably can find it online, but she said something like, uh. _If you really want to get schooled on this by a professional I know a lawyer you could talk to_.”

“Oh my god.” Something stutters up out of her that could be a laugh. “Wait, why does that mean me, she could have been talking about you or Foggy, or even Hogarth, who knows—”

“The guy was complaining about the, uh. How he thought the gender wage gap doesn’t exist, I think, and she—she had the voice, that she uses, when she’s mad at whoever’s calling in but she can’t kick them off without losing ratings—”

“The _I’m Going To Force My Microphone Down Your Throat_ voice,” says Darcy.

“Yeah. And when he asked what lawyers had to do with it, she said, _well, really, in addition to all the law she could throw in your face about how amazingly unjust it is that women of all races and sexualities don’t get paid the same as straight white men for doing an equal or better job, she’d tell you, you know, that you might want to tell the women in your life why you deserve more money than they do just because you exist, and see what they say._ ”

“Oh my god,” Darcy says again. “She’s going to be in so much trouble.”

“He hung up pretty fast.”

“I mean, I would have said it, but—”

“I thought I was going to wake you up, I was laughing too hard.” He clears his throat. “And there was—I think there’s a new family of raccoons or cats or something hiding behind the dumpster in the alley because they keep scratching.”

“Can’t tell the difference?”

“I haven’t thought about it too much. There are just a lot of them.”

“They could be rats.”

“No, wrong size.”

“Of course they’re the wrong size,” she says. “You can’t tell if they’re cats or raccoons but they can’t possibly be rats because they’re the wrong _size_.”

“It’s not like I’ve spent more than ten seconds thinking about them beyond when they keep me awake at night,” Matt says. “Besides, they’re hitting the dumpster a lot, and it—”

He stops. _Echoes,_ she thinks. Matt’s said a grand total of nothing about his head in weeks, but— _God, please let nothing else go wrong. Please._

“Sure, Mr. Fantastic, make up excuses” says Darcy.  She wipes her eyes again. “Is that name taken yet?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“Kind of a douchey name anyway.” She breathes, in through her nose, out through her mouth. In for seven, out for eleven. Is she weak for this? She doesn’t know. She’d been telling the truth, after the party. She’s so fucking sick of fighting with Matt. “I love you, okay?”

Matt’s quiet, the kind of quiet that usually only accompanies a lot of blinking, the few times she manages to catch him off guard, the few times she can surprise him. He says, “I love you. Do you want me to come and meet you?”

“Nah, I can get back okay.” She blows her nose into a napkin. “Just—can you tell me other things that are going on there? That’ll help.”  

.

.

.

She makes the call before she can think better of it, still walking, a good ten blocks away from the coffee shop. She’s spent every night in there, the past week or so, waiting for Ben Urich, for answers, and now she can’t stop moving further away from it. _A sniper. Wesley. James._ _The Goodmans and Wilson Fisk._ Her eyes hurt. She’s hooked the earbuds in, just to keep people from asking questions, from talking to her, but there’s no point. The world’s a blur of images, nothing more. She can’t focus on any of the crowd long enough to read their lips.

Vanessa’s in reading glasses, which Maya knows she hates. She never wears them if anyone can see her, outside of Maya or possibly Christian. Then again, nobody stays in the Boston house except for Maya, and Christian, and the Guerras, and neither of them would ever comment. “Has something happened?” she says, without looking at the screen. She’s blurred a little through FaceTime, hair curling around her bones. “I didn’t expect to hear from you for another few hours, after you texted.”

“Tell me again,” Maya says. “What happened in New York, with—with Wilson and Daredevil and Lilith, and you and Iris, tell me what happened. From the beginning.”

Vanessa stops. The air almost seems to quiver, even with hours and miles and cities between them. , and takes off her glasses. She looks right into the camera. “Has something gone wrong with Brannigan?”

“Just tell me.”

Behind Vanessa, there’s a TV playing. The video quality is too low for Maya to make any of it out, but she thinks it might be the news. Or something. Possibly some kind of documentary. There’s a bench on the edge of the sidewalk, and she sinks down onto it, ignoring the heat still caught in the metal of the arm, ignoring the smell of the gutter beneath. She keeps her eyes on the screen of the phone, on Vanessa, and she waits until Vanessa’s resettled herself in her armchair, drawing one knee up to her chest the way a child does, curling into the cushions.

“I told you going down the path of dealing with that law firm was inadvisable,” says Vanessa. “I’m guessing that’s why you’re asking.”

“I don’t agree.”

“I know you don’t agree, but that doesn’t change my mind.” She rubs at her eyes. “You know my opinion on this. You’re handling the firm with kid gloves when what you ought to be doing is wedging them into the gap. The incident with the music school managed to get your foot in the door. You could have used one of them to lure the masks out weeks ago.”

“If I had,” Maya says, “in all likelihood someone would have ended up dead. Considering how delicate everything already is, I figured that was something we were trying to avoid.”

Vanessa’s nostrils flare. “You could have at least dropped the suit. If we’re talking about unnecessary attention, that would be a primary cause.”

There’s a piece of scone caught between two back teeth. She can’t pick at it, not now, not on the street, but prodding at it with her tongue isn’t working either. It’s wedged too tight. “You do understand that’s not how a lawsuit works, don’t you, I can’t just—pull out of it whenever I want.”

“Of course you can,” says Vanessa. “Have them retract the suit, fire them, do as you like. Nelson, Murdock, and Lewis are a means to an end, and if you’re too squeamish to use them as bait, then I’m sure Brannigan can manage it.”

“Don’t. I’m not done with them yet.”

“What possible use could you have for those people?”

 _Other than Lewis being the first person in fifteen years to try and help me find out who murdered my father?_ But no. She’s not saying that, not to Vanessa. Vanessa, the Guerras, Wilson, all of them would prefer to imagine that her father never existed, and Lewis helping her—no. Vanessa would be _furious_ if she knew. “There’s something I’m working on, all right? Just—let them be for now.”

“I don’t appreciate the tone, Maya,” says Vanessa, and abruptly, mutinously, Maya thinks, _well, you’re not my mother._ “It’s a waste of time and resources. The venture should have been scrapped as soon as they denied any relation with our masked friends.”

Logically, yes. Logically, she should have. But the thought of it had made her throat go sour, letting that stupid, little man and his stupid, little notions keep on getting away with treating her, and people like her, all the students and their families who aren’t cake-batter white, as lesser, as invasions. The last time she’d been on campus, a student had caught her in the bathroom and held her hand so tight that it’d left marks behind. _The school’s always done this,_ she’d said. _To us. Somebody needed to do something_. So, yes. Logically, she should have pulled away from Nelson, Murdock, and Lewis weeks ago. Somehow, she never had.

“Maya,” says Vanessa. It takes a moment to process, the movement of her mouth. “Why are you asking about Daredevil and Lilith? You know the story. You’ve researched it for months. Why now?”

She can remember sitting curled into the side of a couch, watching people cross back and forth, men and women, talking about what needed to be done with her. Reading the words on their lips. She’d never spoken much as a child, and she hadn’t spoken then, just sat and watched. Weeks after her father had died and she’d still tasted copper on her lips. _Maya,_ he’d said, and even then he’d spoken slow, though she’d been getting so much better with reading lips, slow and careful, dying words. _Maya, run from this. Don’t look back at me._ She’d watched the people spin and spiral out like old cars, and then flutter, a flock of disturbed birds, when they’d realized there were intruders in their midst. Fifteen years ago, it had been Larks, Wilson and Larks, tall, blonde, ice-man Larks instead of thin, sharp Wesley, but the dynamic had been so similar. One man standing with his arms behind his back, bespectacled, speaking with his face turned away so she couldn’t read his mouth. The other man, larger, who’d crouched in front of her, who’d lowered himself down to the carpet to meet her eyes, and said, very carefully, _Maya, my name is Wilson. I’m here to give you a home, if you would like one._

_On a hook. Like in fishing._

She looks down at the phone again. Vanessa’s watching her, lips tight, her eyes like chips of glass behind the lenses of her reading glasses. She’s thinner, Maya realizes all at once. She’s gone back to working through the night again, not eating. Bringing more and more Irish into the country has been straining their delicate resources. It’s not exactly inexpensive to smuggle gangsters across international waters, even with Vanessa’s father’s contacts. A good deal of the Manfredi branch of the Maggia aren’t particularly inclined to take orders from a woman, either, regardless of her name or her heritage. “Sorry,” she says. “You’re right. I don’t—you’re right.”

Vanessa watches her, jaw pinching. She takes off her glasses, throws them out of range of the camera. “If someone affiliated with the firm told you something that made you uncomfortable, I can clarify.”

“I know what happened.” To the extent that she can, with what files she’s been able to access, with what information she’s been given and what she’s found on her own. “I don’t need it explained again, believe me, I’m aware of what happened.”

“Are you quite sure?” Vanessa’s gone all fox, her teeth bared, her eyes narrowed. Or no, not fox, Maya thinks. Mongoose. A beautiful, sharp-toothed mongoose, canines bared against a serpent. “Because I can go into quite explicit detail as to what happened when Lilith and her bitch archer caught up with me on that rooftop. Davos is the only reason I escaped.”

“And where’s Davos now?” Maya snaps. “He’s been gone for three months.”

“I can’t tell you that.”

 _No, but he’s looking into your father’s disappearance, I’m sure of it._ That, or doing something for Madame Gao. Or both. There’s no way to be certain without hacking into Vanessa’s files, and that’s a boundary she will not cross. She hadn’t even _liked_ Davos. Him and his spider hands and mirror eyes, who’d never once looked at something without the sense that he was weighing it up to be used. In pieces. The way a poacher looks at a tiger, studying its parts rather than the sum. “I know.”

“Do I need to remind you that your father is in prison because of these three?” Her mouth wobbles. “That because of them the entire enterprise was dismantled? That I am living in hiding?”

 _My father is dead. Don’t look back at me._ But all she’s ever done is look back, every moment, all of it ringing through her bones, _don’t look back at me_ and blood smeared across her nose and mouth from the touch of his hand. She can’t look forward, not yet. There’s too much left for her to see, and no matter what Lilith and Daredevil have done, if she can use them—

_Fucking hell, I don’t know if I want to kill them or beg them for help._

“I know,” Maya says.

“Do I need to say it again? James Wesley is dead because of their interference. So is Leland Owlsley, putrid little man though he was. And now in the face of everything they’ve done to the city we love, Maya: you’re having second thoughts _now_?”

 _Not my city_ , she nearly says. She has no city. She holds no ties, not truly. She supposes that if she went back to Lame Deer there might be some kind of feeling there, but she’d never left the house she’d lived in with her father. The only place she’s ever felt at home was Boston, and now that’s Vanessa’s territory, not hers. _I suppose I’m Wilson’s fiancée,_ and she’d pulled Vanessa into the house and she does not and will not regret it, but she has no home. She has no attachment to this city. She and Wesley had been together, in that, she thinks. James had never understood why Wilson cared so deeply for this city, and neither had she, and it had been an unacknowledged kind of understanding between them, raised eyebrows behind other people’s backs.  It had been the only thing to connect them, really.

_—playing Angry Birds while you screamed—_

(She shouldn’t be able to see the man who helped her with her statistics homework in college torturing someone so easily. She shouldn’t be able to imagine that, but she can.)  

When she’d been sixteen she’d read the lips of Wilson in a meeting with men who’d turned out to be Madame Gao’s, and realized—so late, so stupidly late, considering how very stupid she’s not—that the man who’d given her a home and caretakers and a way to speak, who’d helped her realize what she could do with her abilities, who’d put her into school, was not a businessman the way she’d first imagined. And she’d felt so stupid, until he’d found her hiding in a tree and brought her down and explained it to her, the reason why he’d waded so deep into the mud. _Sometimes,_ he’d said, _one must bury oneself in insects, behave like an insect, before finally drawing the swarm into the insecticide you carry behind your back._ Infiltration and destruction. She understands that, she does. But—

( _I want you to imagine it,_ Lewis had said, and now she can’t _stop_ imagining it, because she’d walked into the living room and found her father dying on the floor and it must have happened while she was asleep, muffled in silence, unknowing, had the men who’d murdered Willie Lincoln looked into her room and decided to leave her there, the mute girl, the unhearing girl, the girl who would never be able to give them away, or had they never looked in on her at all, never realized she was there, had they never put it together that Willie Lincoln had a child—

 _Don’t look back at me, Maya, don’t look back—_ )

“I’m not,” she says, because if she says it, then it feels a little more true. “Having second thoughts.”

“Are you sure? Because what it sounds like to me is that you met with the lawyer woman again and came out of it with something very strongly resembling second thoughts.”

Maya bites her tongue. “Why did Wesley have Lewis tortured?”

“Don’t tell me you’re becoming fond of her,” says Vanessa. “What did she tell you, that we tried to have her killed? We did. Wilson would have done it himself, if she hadn’t pulled out her taser and electrocuted him in the throat. She was in the way of the work, she had to be eliminated.”

“No, I know,” Maya says. She thinks there might be blood on her tongue. There’s a coppery feel to her mouth that she can’t explain otherwise. “But that’s—getting rid of her is different from _torture_.”

“She had information we needed.”

“But—”

 _But what, Maya?_ But she doesn’t know what she expected from the firm, from Lewis in particular, but it’s not this? It’s not this—God, what to call it. It’s _kindness._ She looks at Lewis and she can’t think of the woman that Vanessa had described, back in Boston, the angry, bitter lawyer who’d relished it, the whole of Wilson’s fall. She can’t see that. She can see the anger, but she can’t see the relish. She can see anger, and pain, and what had been simple is now so much more complicated. Lewis is dreadfully human, and Maya’s not sure how to translate it, because Lewis is human, but Lewis is also the woman who jammed her taser so hard into Wilson Fisk’s throat that there are scars, two puckering marks beside his trachea, burns like a vampire bite. He hadn’t been able to wear a collar high enough to hide it, during the trial, and they’d been damning.

 _We are all his tools,_ Wesley had said. _In our own way, we all of us are here to be useful._

“But?” Vanessa says.

“Nothing.” Her tongue has turned to dust and bone. “It doesn’t matter. Never mind.” 

“If something’s happened—” 

“Nothing in particular.” She forces herself into a simulacrum smile. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be all right, Vanessa.”

All at once the fight goes out of her, the snapping teeth. Vanessa sighs, presses her face into her hands for a moment. The angle’s odd. She must have left the phone on the table. She says, “I shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions, my darling, I’m sorry.”

Maya shrugs. “It’s all right.”

“It wasn’t, and I apologize.” She rubs at her eyes again. “Brannigan is driving me mad. If I could stake him through the hands and feet and leave him to die in a desert, I would. But your father needs his men.”

“I know.” She swallows back the ash. “Can’t build bricks without clay.”

“Have you come across them again? Daredevil and Lilith.”

For some odd reason, she thinks of the photos that Vanessa showed her once, of Lewis and the devil settled in a fire escape, the devil reaching out with gloved fingers to touch Lewis’s bare shoulder. Not quite intimate, not quite strangers. _James kept backups of open investigations,_ Vanessa had said, when she’d asked where the photos came from. _Some of our people managed to get this to me before they were arrested._ She’s only met Daredevil once, if you can call fighting in a catacomb a meeting. Still, there’s something haunting her about the whole thing, the photo and Lewis’s story and the way Lilith had sounded on the rooftop when she’d said _you could not have picked a worse time for this,_ only half paying attention to the fight, half of her completely elsewhere.

Vanessa waves her hand in front of the camera. “You’re very distracted today.”

“Just thinking.” Maya pinches her lip. “No, I haven’t—I haven’t seen them lately. I’ve been keeping my head down, helping Brannigan. Like I said I would.”

“I see.” Vanessa rubs hard at her nose. “Maya, if you’re—”

“Brannigan wants me patrolling again tonight. I’ll call you after.”

“Maya, wait,” Vanessa says, or starts to say, but Maya’s already turned the screen away so she doesn’t have to read it on her mouth. She hangs up, and stares hard at the trash in the gutter, waiting for nonexistent water to come and wash it away. Of course, nothing happens at all.

.

.

.

She stops to grab bagels from the local Jewish bakery on the way back just because she wants to. ( _Money, Darcy, come on, think about it_ , but food is important, isn’t it, and if everything works, _if, if, if_ —) She’s expecting Foggy and Karen to be there, really; they’ve all stuck close to the firm this week, trying to race against the clock, get an argument together that isn’t complete claptrap, and it’s been hard on every single one of them, but she’s not quite expecting the level of—

_I think the word for this might be stressed._

She’s barely opened the door before Foggy’s looming up in the gap. “I need to talk to you about something,” he says, and pushes her shoulders, back and back, until he can yank the door shut behind him and crowd her down the hall. Darcy nearly loses her grip on her bag of bagels. “Come on—”

“Foggy, what the fuck—”

“Did you invite her here?” He’s all high and creaky, his eyes huge. “Did you invite her or did Matt or did she just like—show up like a bad penny, is this a thing that’s going to happen from now on—”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Elektra,” he says in a hiss. “Elektra in our _office._ Elektra who apparently waited until both of you were _gone_ until she swanned in looking like a vampire and said she wanted to talk to _you_.”

“Oh,” she says. “Shit.”

“Shit like you didn’t expect her or shit like _Foggy, I’m sorry I didn’t let you know that Matt’s ex is now apparently a crime fighter and part-time dominatrix and she’s going to show up in the office when neither of us are there_?”

“The first one.” She rubs at her face. “Christ. She has my number, she doesn’t need to drop in unannounced. She could’ve just texted me.”

“She has your phone number.”

“Karen gave it to her ages ago, remember?” says Darcy, and Foggy’s eyes about roll into the back of his head. “Don’t look like that. We’re working on a thing, she needs to be able to contact us.”

“Setting aside the weirdness of Matt’s ex-girlfriend having your phone number and, apparently, knowing she can use it, she is currently in our _office_. Karen keeps twitching every time she says something, which is frequently, by the way, she’s full of little comments, and I don’t remember her being this chatty during law school, ever—”

“Foggy.”

“—though I wasn’t sleeping with her so that might be why—”

“Foggy, seriously—”

“—and she’s making things very difficult for everyone, even the freaking dog is having a problem, I swear to God, Rey hasn’t come out from under Karen’s desk in an hour—”

“ _Foggy_ ,” she says, and pinches his elbow. “Slow down, dude. Seriously, take a breath.”

“She _cannot be here._ ” His eyes are about popping out of his head. “She just—she can’t come here, okay, if she’s as deep into this as you say she is just having her in the building is grounds for Reyes ripping us to pieces, not to mention the fact that I’m pretty sure she’s worked out like six ways to kill someone with our office equipment in the past ten minutes and it’s very uncomfortable to picture it—”

 _More than that, probably,_ but saying that to Foggy will help absolutely nothing. “I’ll get her out,” she says, and hands Foggy the bagel bag. _Nothing happened all of it was fake, and you can deal with her. You’ve done it before now, you can manage today._ She’s not about to let this kill her good mood. “What happened to the guy who faced down rage-crazed gangbangers with scalpels? And the Dogs of Hell?”

“Those were ‘bangers,” Foggy says. “And I about peed myself with those, too, not gonna lie. Elektra’s—not a ‘banger.”

 _No, Elektra isn’t a ‘banger._ Whatever Elektra is, she’s not a ‘banger. “It’s not like she’s gonna pull a knife on any of you,” she says. “She’s—”

Darcy stops. Foggy lifts his eyebrows. “Having an adjectival failure there? Pretty common with attorneys your age.”

“Fuck you.” She pats his cheek. “Getting scruffy here, dude, you’ll hit Murdock levels soon. Which I could tell you things about, but you probably don’t want to know.”

“Oh my god, please, just—stop talking, that’s the last thing I need to hear right now.” Foggy catches her hand. “You okay? Your eyes are red.”

“I’m fine.”

“Setting aside the obvious lie that was, can we get Matt’s ex out of the office so we can get some work done? I think Karen’s going to jump out of her chair if she stays here any longer.”

Frankly, Darcy doubts that, but Foggy and Matt both still have their weird mental glitch thing about how fragile Karen Page can be. Until Karen actually shoots someone in front of them, it’s probably not gonna change all that much. “Pretty sure she won’t go until she says what she came to say, so.” She pinches his wrist under the watchband. “If you wanna go hide in the bathroom I won’t hold it against you.”

“She’s not chasing me out of my own damn office,” Foggy says. “Besides, unlike her rich ass, I have shit to do during the day.”

“I’m pretty sure she does too, considering she’s been made a member of the board of a Roxxon offshoot company after her dad died.”

Foggy doesn’t say anything. He just scoffs.

“So bitter,” says Darcy, and links her arm through his. “When did we all turn into Russian peasants with the fire of revolution in our hearts?”

“Probably about the same time we realized money made the world go ‘round, and none of us had it.” Still, he presses her elbow close into his side before letting go. “You guys aren’t gonna like—”

“If anything close to the term _cat fight_ comes out your mouth right now, I will actually brain you, and you know I can do it.”

Foggy puts his hands up in surrender, and follows her back into the office.

Thank fuck, she thinks, that Elektra picked today, and right now, to come into the office instead of say—two days ago when one of Reyes’s stooges had been poking their nose in here in a very poor attempt to unsettle them. She’s not entirely sure how Reyes’s Stooge No. 1 would have taken it, coming into the office to find a leopard lounging in the waiting chairs, but Foggy’s right. It probably wouldn’t have gone over very well. Elektra flicks a look through her eyelashes, from top to toe. She and Marisol, Darcy thinks, need to have a lipstick competition, because god _damn._ “There you are.”

“If you wanted me to show up earlier, you should’ve called.” Darcy nudges Foggy. “Matt’s not here.”

“Franklin didn’t tell you, then?”

“Not your messenger boy, Elphaba,” Foggy says. “I also asked you not to call me that like…six times, but apparently you have selective hearing.”

“I refuse to use a weather pattern as a name for anybody.”

“And thus we are at an impasse, because I don’t think I’m going to call you anything other than Elphaba for the rest of my life, and believe me, it’s on purpose.” Foggy starts sorting through the bagel bag. “Oo, seeds. This part of the day has looked up, at least.”

“Knock yourself out, bro,” says Darcy, and starts for her office. “Karen, were there any calls, or—”

“Not for you.” Karen’s watching Elektra the way someone else might watch a sea snake. Or a bear. Or a rabid coywolf. “Some for Matt, but those are on his desk.”

“Cool.” She thieves a file off of Karen’s desk marked _F. Castle—Warehouse._ “Still don’t know what you’re doing here, Elektra. It’s the middle of the workday, we’re kind of busy at the moment.”

“I’m unspeakably bored,” Elektra says, and eyes Rey, who’s emerged from under Karen’s desk to stick her nose into Darcy’s palm. “Now, you I remember.”

Karen’s smile is all icicles and frost. “Don’t like dogs?”

“They’re a bit too obsequious for me.” Still, when Elektra offers a hand, and Rey sniffs it, she doesn’t draw back. “You’re not as skinny as you were, little thing.”

“Everyone has a story,” says Darcy. “What did you want? Like I said, Matt’s not here, and I don’t think he’s going to be back for a while.” Considering his mood when it comes to Elektra, Darcy’s honestly not sure he wouldn’t stay out longer just to piss her off if she _had_ come to see him. It’s a process. “Unless you just wanted to, y’know, leave a note.”

“I don’t want to talk to Matthew today.” She pets at Rey’s ear, and then straightens again. “I’m not in the mood right now.”

“You need a mood to talk to Matt?”

Elektra’s lips curl. “Don’t you?”

Foggy, in the door to his office, makes a noise like a mouse. “This is really nothing I want to know.”

“Don’t let me chase you out, Franklin,” says Elektra, without looking away from Darcy. “It’s your office, after all. I’m only a visitor to the establishment.”

She’s wondering if Karen’s actually going to break a tooth, what with how hard she’s clenching her jaw. “Look, I get that you guys have history or whatever—”

 _History_ is one word for it. For a second she gets a flash of it, what it must have been, at the party, but she shoves it away just as fast. _It was fake, there’s no blame to be laid anywhere, quit being antsy._ From the look on Elektra’s face, she knows exactly what flickered into Darcy’s head, and it’s funny. That, or she’s just seen some hilarious writing on the wall.  

“—but you have _no_ right to come in here and—”

“We’re cool, Karen, it’s okay.”

Elektra lifts a brow. “Are we?”

“For the most part. So long as you don’t bite anybody.” Darcy pushes her glasses up her nose. _Christ, I need, like—the world’s largest shot of vodka right now._ “You have my number, Elektra. You could’ve called me instead of hanging around being persnickety.”

Her heels give her an extra three inches on Darcy, which Darcy _absolutely refuses_ to find irritating. Elektra threads her fingers through her bracelets, rubbing her thumb over the woven metal, back and forth and back again, pause, back and forth and back again. She’s coiled, Darcy thinks. There’s energy just about _crackling_ off her, so fierce there should be sparks. No wonder Foggy and Karen have been twitchy. “I could have, but I wanted to see what the pair of you do with all your daylight time. And to be fair, I did offer to put money into this place, I thought that a look at it was the least that I could bother even after you turned me down cold.”

“Have a verdict?”

“It’s—small.”

She can actually _hear_ Karen’s teeth grinding. “We’re small but mighty,” Darcy says, and seizes Elektra by the elbow to frogmarch her into the office Darcy shares with Matt, kicking the door shut with her heel. “Which I feel like you can relate to—is there a reason you’re trying to get Karen to strangle you?”

“I told you, I was bored,” she says. “I’m always incredibly bored.”

“So learn to knit, Holmes, it helps.”

Elektra wrinkles her nose. “Knitting? How very domestic.”

“Don’t judge people for knitting, it helps with anxiety and gets you cool scarves in the bargain.” She drops into her rolling chair. “Besides, it involves needles. I feel like you’re into that.”

“Pointed objects?” There’s a flash of teeth from Elektra, and holy shit, when the hell did this become her daily life, forcibly separating Elektra Natchios and Karen Page to keep them from murdering each other? “Of course.”

“Seriously, though, Elektra, if you’re bored, then do something else. I don’t know, go find a new restaurant to try out in some hole downtown. Binge on Netflix. Beat up a punching bag. Just—don’t come down here to get on Foggy and Karen’s collective nerves.”

“Please. They weren’t bothered, just mildly inconvenienced.”

“You say that,” Darcy says, “because you’ve never seen Karen really angry.”

Elektra trips her fingers over the baubles on Darcy’s desk. She touches photo frames, the back of Darcy’s laptop, a stack of files, notebooks, dragging the pads of her fingers over every surface like she’s searching for flaws in ceramic. “I’m not here for them, anyway. Though it was interesting to finally see everything, you know, in context. The day job, the—is it a cover, or a legitimate occupation, what the pair of you do?”

“If you’re asking me whether or not I’m serious about being a lawyer, then I’m actually gonna have to laugh in your face.”

“Hm.” Her mouth tilts. “Seems like a division of loyalties, spending all night breaking the law just to try and follow it the next morning.”

“I don’t really see it as breaking the law, more like—I don’t know. Filling in where the law leaves off. Which is beside the point.”

“Hm,” says Elektra again, and thieves a pen out of the Columbia Law School mug on Darcy’s desk. “So is that what happened to your face?”

“Lady threw a knife at me. I’m over it.” Darcy crosses her arms over her chest. The office feels very small, with Elektra in it. It can comfortably fit four people, but right now, it’s cramped. “So I’m guessing you haven’t had any luck breaking the code.”

“If I had, would I be here?” She flickers the pen over her fingers, twirling it around her thumb in defiance of the laws of physics. _What the shit, how the hell do you even do that, it has to be a balance thing but—fuck. Focus._ “They knew who I was.”

“The yakuza?”

She tips her head towards the door. “Your little friends.”

 _Little friends._ That’s possibly worse than sidekicks. “You’ve met Foggy before. And Karen heard you were in town, y’know, it’s a small office. Not like we can hide things from each other in here.”

Elektra cocks an eyebrow. Darcy can’t really remember seeing Elektra on campus more than twice, if that, but she’s pretty sure this is the _don’t give me shit_ look that some of the guys at Columbia Law had called the _tear your balls off with her teeth_ expression. “You know what I’m trying to say, you needn’t be evasive. They know what you are.”

And there goes her heart, banging like a screen door in a hurricane. “What, a Leo? Fluent in bullshit? Deathly allergic to strawberries?”

“Lilith.”

Now she kind of gets why Matt’s sighing all the time when they talk to Elektra. “If you’re asking if they know you’re Matt’s ex, obviously, yeah. If you’re asking whether or not they know who I am, and who he is, that’s—really not any of your business.”

“Isn’t it?” She perches on the edge of the desk, crossing her legs, hooking her ankles together. She’s not wearing a jacket, and holy shit, she might not be so built as Jen is now, but Elektra Natchios has capital-A Arms. It’s kind of intimidating. “If the pair of you are ever exposed, it could be quite inexpedient for many people. I’m one of them, in my own way. So I don’t see that it’s out of line for me to ask if your legal partner or your secretary is aware of how the pair of you, well.” Elektra bares her teeth. “Get creative about the consequential part of justice.”

 _That’s one way to put it, I guess._ “First of all, Karen’s not a secretary, she’s our legal assistant—”

“Because that’s such a profound difference.”

“It is, believe it or not. And secondly—” Darcy winds her hair up into a bun at the back of her head, and stabs a pencil into it. “—I trust them.”

“You shouldn’t.” Elektra spins the pen again. “Neither of them are particularly good liars. And trust doesn’t have much bearing on what you say with needles under your fingernails.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t plan on letting either of them get tortured anytime soon.”

“With the Yoshioka in the mix, you might not actually have a choice.”

 _I’m not sure if I should laugh or cry, Jesus._ “If all you came here for was to talk about torture, I’m gonna have to take a raincheck. There’s a huge trial coming up that I need to work on. I do have a life, outside of hunting the yakuza down.”

“The pair of you and your fairy stories.” Elektra shifts her hips when Darcy yanks at a file, moves her weight so she can pry it out from under Elektra’s ass. “No, I did have a reason, believe it or not. As fascinating as torture can be. I wanted to talk to you.”

Apparently, this is a day for miracles. “…really.”

“I feel like we’ve managed to get off on the wrong foot,” Elektra says, with just a hint of teeth. “Which is to be expected, considering the circumstances.”

“Which circumstances, the yakuza or the emotional minefield? Because it could swing either way.”

Elektra doesn’t twitch, but there’s a flicker—not to her face, but to her shoulders, a twist that echoes in the air like a torqued muscle. Darcy bites her tongue. “Sorry. I’m—that was unnecessary. I’m just kind of running out of patience with the whole game you’re playing here.”

“Game?”

“You ask us for help and then spend every moment you get being abrasive, I don’t know how that isn’t some kind of game.”

Something in Elektra’s face pinches, tightens, settles around her mouth, between her eyes. “Not all of us can be so damn saintly as you, Lilith.”

“I’m nowhere near saintly, trust me.”

“Not what Matthew seems to think.”

“Matt,” Darcy says, “hits his head a lot.”

Elektra scrunches her nose. “That’s beside the point.”

“Whatever. If there’s one thing I really don’t get, it’s why you keep being so snarly when you actually _asked_ us to come on board.” Darcy snags a highlighter out of her drawer, and sets to work. She’s halfway down the first page before she realizes she’s looked over this file before, and bends to trade it out with another. “Considering how you keep telling people you’re not here to play games, you’re doing a damn good job of pissing everyone off. Which I know you’re doing on purpose, before you say anything.”

“Can I help it if the lot of you are so much more sensitive than you used to be?”

“No,” she says, “but you can help being intentionally aggravating. You ask for help and then bite when we try, it’s not a great combo.”  

“Yes, well,” Elektra says, lightly, “you’re doing much better than Matthew.”

For Christ’s sake. She jabs her highlighter against the paper, swears when she smears a great swath of pink over everything irrelevant. “If you’re angry with me, Elektra, fine. I can get that. I’m not too happy with you, either, but just—this is complicated enough without dragging all this other stuff into it, so can we just pretend that we’re all perfect strangers or something until all of this is over? It’d make _my_ life easier, that’s for damn sure, and it might help the pair of you to quit treating each other like enemies and actually work together on something. As hard as that must be.”

The silence actually echoes. Elektra stops spinning her stolen pen, and stares, stares and stares, the considering, reevaluating, half-frustrated look from the limousine. The _you did something unexpected and now I have to recalibrate_ look. The _why don’t you do what I think you will_ look. It’s something Darcy sees in the prosecution, sometimes, when she manages a bait-and-switch and drags something out into the light the other side doesn’t want noticed. Elektra watches her until Darcy has to duck her head, and she keeps on staring even after, her eyes boring holes in Darcy’s scalp. Nearly a full minute goes by before Elektra scoffs, and slides off of Darcy’s desk.

“I wanted your help with something,” she says.

 _Have the moon and the sun crashed into each other?_ “I’m kind of busy today, you might have noticed.”

“I said I wanted your help, not that I wanted you to tag along.” She starts pacing back and forth, from the door to the whiteboard and back again. Her heels might actually be leaving marks in the linoleum. “I need to get into the tenement that Kate Bishop owns. I’d assume you have a key code.”

“Well, I do, but—” She lets her file rest against her laptop. “Why do you want in to the tenement?”

“The man who encrypted the ledger we found in the Yakatomi Building—not to mention your medical files, whatever they are—has proved difficult to uncover on my own.” Elektra keeps pacing, prowling. Like a lion, Darcy thinks. An animal in a cage. “I’ve been looking, but until my underworld contacts get back in touch with me there’s very little to do.”

“You could try breaking the code yourself.”

“Have you ever tried breaking a code written in a language that isn’t your native tongue? It’s  fantastically frustrating. I’m fairly sure it has everything to do with the kanji radicals, but—” Elektra flaps a hand. “Anyway. With Kate Bishop in hiding and the perpetrator of this— _immensely_ irritating little code scheme currently in the wind, I thought poking around the tenement might actually get us some results. Considering the Yoshioka have already marked it as their own.”

“If you call graffiti in the basement a mark.” Darcy wrinkles her nose. “It’s all very dog-peeing-on-hydrant, but I guess that works.”

Elektra’s mouth hits _Danger: Tilt_ levels again. “I want to see it.”  

“There’s not really that much to see. It’s graffiti.”

“But it was done by the yakuza.” All at once, she’s gone ferociously still, holding herself so close that sparks should be crackling off her hair and skin. The energy’s fucking palpable. No wonder the room feels tiny. “I’ve researched the yakuza much longer than either of you. They’ve marked that building for a reason. I want to know what that is.”

“Then go look. There are loads of ways you can get in there that don’t need me. Go through the roof access door or something.”

There’s a pinched, sour look on Elektra’s face when she says, “I tried. They wouldn’t let me in.”

They? Who the hell is _they_? “The yakuza?”

“No.” She scowls. “The residents.”

…. _what the fuck._ “So what you’re telling me,” says Darcy, “is that an itty-bitty old Guatemalan lady and her groceries kept you from getting in the front door?”

“I didn’t ask for a nationality,” Elektra snaps. “He met me at the roof access door and made it very clear that it would be in my best interests to leave. Normally I would have been able to get him out of the way, but with these _ridiculous_ rules—”

“You’re not killing anyone in that building, Elektra.”

“I wouldn’t have killed him,” says Elektra, in deep disgust. “Don’t be absurd. I would have knocked him out. But I _didn’t_ , because we’re not supposed to draw attention to ourselves, which, as I said, is _ridiculous._ The yakuza already know I’m here. That was the whole point of driving a worm into their mainframe.”

That’s. Not inaccurate. But still. “And they sent like—a dozen assassins to kill you afterwards, it’s not a great combo. Like—sriracha mixed with pig’s blood terrible.”

Elektra blinks at her. “I don’t remember you being this vile at Columbia.”

“I mean, it’s not like we were best buddies. I only saw you a couple of times.”

And they’re back to the bracelets, Elektra’s thumb tickling against the metal. “Believe me, I’m aware.”

It’s the same airy, devil-may-care, _I don’t give a shit what you think_ voice that she’d used when she’d broken into the apartment, the same floaty little voice that she’d used when she said _he’s always been very proprietary of you and your time_ , and for the first time Darcy thinks: _holy shit._ Was she jealous? When Elektra and Matt had been dating, the few times Matt had come back to ask questions and snap and snarl—had Elektra been jealous of that? She clears her throat. “So what’d he look like, this guy at the roof access door?” 

Elektra shrugs. “Dark. Young. College age, maybe. Must have been keeping an eye on the security cameras, he was at the door to meet me when I went to pick the lock.”

Young and dark. _Note to self: Miles Morales might be taking his job as building watchdog way too seriously._ Ah, shit. “I’ll look into it.”

“I can’t get into the building until you do, so—” The bracelets click together. “Faster is better.” 

“The graffiti isn’t even all that interesting. All it says is _Black Sky_ in kanji.”

“To you,” Elektra says, “yes. That’s all it says.”

“You’re saying there’s a secret message in the paint or something?”

“No, but—placement matters, to the Yoshioka. Placement, paint, location. I want to go over it from top to bottom.” She goes back to pacing. “I’ll find a way to get inside no matter what you do. I just thought that it would be simpler to go down the path of least resistance.”

It’s better than it could be. Not by much, but it’s better than it could be. “Fine,” Darcy says, but doesn’t get up. “I need to go to the tenement this afternoon anyway. But before that, I need to finish going over these files, so. Your options right now are wait in the main office, or wait in the coffee shop down the street, but either way, it’s gonna be a few hours.”

Elektra huffs. “Can’t it wait?”

“No.”

“All you’re doing is reading.”

“Yeah, as prep for a court case. It’s important reading. Not something I can put off, considering we’re going to be going against the District Attorney herself for this one.” _And it’s partly my fault that we’re doing it at all._ “There are at least ten more just like this one in that box on the floor, too, and I need to get through those. I need about three hours.”

“All I need is for you to send a damn text.”

“If there’s something in that graffiti that you can find out that I haven’t, then I want to be there.”

“What, don’t trust me to tell you what I find?”

“I trust you not to stab me in the back,” Darcy says. “And I trust that you really want to take the yakuza down, though I’m not sure it has anything to do with your dad, considering you haven’t mentioned him once outside of his relationship with Roxxon. Still, I’d rather be there. And you’re not gonna get in without me, anyway, especially not with Kate in hiding.”

“Christ, you’re worse than Matthew.”

“Nobody’s ever said that to me before and I’m not sure I can take it as a compliment.” She’s staring so hard at the page that her eyes are starting to cross. It’s very uncomfortable. “You wanna help speed things up, you could make coffee or something. Make a day of it. Wander around Hell’s Kitchen. I’m sure you can find something to do.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Elektra says, and drops into the chair set up by Darcy’s desk. “And I’m not making your coffee for you.”

 _I will not grind my teeth. I will not._ “Okie-doke. Just don’t touch any of the files, all right? They’re already mixed all to hell, I don’t need them any more confused.”

“Your legal assistant isn’t doing her job right, if the files are mixed.”

“Karen’s fixing them,” Darcy says. “It’s the District Attorney that’s messing them up. Or one of her people, anyway, but her prints are all over this passive-aggressive bullshit.” She cuts Elektra a look over the tops of her glasses. “If you’re gonna sit and stare, you could read a book or something. We keep them in a shoebox under the chair outside. Mostly Spanish, but I think there’s one or two in English.”

“That’s absurd,” Elektra says again. “I’m not going to sit and read in your office.”

“And I’m not going anywhere until I get at least these files sorted out, so I guess you’re shit out of luck.” _New message to Katie-Kate: Call your guard dog to heel, will ya? I don’t think Miles getting in Elektra’s way is super beneficial to his health._ “Give me two hours, all right? I should be able to get most of this done by then, and if I can’t, I’ll just—I’ll figure something out.”

“Why the hell does a man like Frank Castle matter so much to any of you?” Elektra leans back in her chair, folds her arms over her stomach. “From what I can tell, you’re the ones who managed to get him into custody in the first place. I’m not a lawyer, but it seems idiotic to take on the man’s case after tying him up into a bow for the police.”

The barb on her tongue is sour as gasoline, biting and cruel. Darcy swallows it back. “It’s complicated.”

“He kills people. The pair of you don’t approve.” She tips her chair back onto its hind legs. “Doesn’t seem particularly difficult from where I’m standing.”

“Frank’s—” _Misguided,_ she thinks, is the term Matt would use. She’s not sure what word she wants, though. “Frank’s…not easy to explain.”

“Do you always trail off into irritating silences, or is that something you save just for me?”

“I don’t get why you care.” She folds the top right-hand corner of her page down. “Like you said, to you it’s boring legal shit. And Frank has nothing to do with the yakuza.”

“Of course he does,” says Elektra, sounding completely, infuriatingly sensible. “He distracts the pair of you from _our_ work, which, to be honest, is more important. Frank Castle’s in jail. He can’t go around murdering gangsters any longer, woe unto him. But the yakuza are out there, and they’re sharpening their knives. For one of your friends, I might add.”

 _New message from Katie-Kate: What the fuck????_ “Like I said, it’s complicated.”

“I don’t see how.”

Darcy almost stabs herself in the eye with her highlighter when she goes to rub her nose. _Is this what parents feel like?_ Jesus fuck, parenting is _horrible._ “I can explain it now, if you want, and add another hour onto your wait time, or you can wait until I’m done doing this, and explain it then if you’re still interested, but either way, if you want me to get through this as fast as possible? You need to quit distracting me. Just—let me work. For two hours.” _And call Matt. I should probably call Matt._ She’ll gladly take Matt and Elektra bitching at each other over dealing with the fallout of wandering off with Elektra somewhere without Matt knowing, considering the whole wrist thing. “Just two hours, all right?”

Elektra snaps her jaw shut, and stares at the wall. Darcy’s kind of tempted to set a timer. _Approximate length of silence: thirty seconds._ She huffs through her nose. “I can’t just sit here for all that time.”

She hadn’t actually imagined there was a human being on the planet worse at being bored than Kate Bishop. Elektra Natchios wins by a landslide. “I told you, there are books.”

“Give me something to do, Lilith, for God’s sake,” Elektra says. “I’m not going to sit here and watch you work for hours on end, and if you’re going to make me wait, you owe me at least that much.”

“Well, I’d make you sign some NDAs and help Karen with reorganizing the files, but I’m pretty sure she would shoot you if I did, so that’s not gonna happen.” She taps the cap of her highlighter against her lips. “If you’re absolutely dying for something to do—”

“Lilith, darling,” says Elektra, “I kill people for a living, that’s not a phrase you want to be using lightly.”

“Like that’s not fucking terrifying.” Setting aside the idea that Elektra Natchios is a fucking assassin, because that’s _way_ too much for her brain at the moment: “Why do you keep doing that?”

“Doing what?”

 _Calling me Lilith._ The _darling_ bit is easier to understand, considering Elektra’s mission to annoy. “Never mind.” She might regret this decision, but—“You see that cardboard box under the whiteboard, with all the files in it?”

“I’m not sorting through your Castle bullshit.”

“You think I’m letting you anywhere near that? Hell no.” She should still print out an NDA though, just in case. She doesn’t think Marisol would mind getting a second opinion on this, but… “There’s a bunch of police files in there from the nineties and early two-thousands about some unsolved murders. All Maggia hits by a guy named Willie Lincoln.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Side-project. Lincoln was murdered fifteen years ago. Nobody knows who by. I’m trying to figure out who killed him as a favor.”

“A favor for who?”

“Doesn’t matter. I can’t find anything else in those files, but you might, I don’t know. Anything would do.” She hits Control-P on her laptop, and Karen starts cursing out Satan’s Printer within about a nanosecond. “You don’t have to if you don’t want, but it might keep your brain from imploding from sitting here watching me highlight things and reorganize case files. Just a suggestion.”

“And what makes you think I would give a damn?”

“I mean, you don’t, but his daughter does. And I’ve looked into your father, a little bit. I figured, y’know. You can at least understand why she’d want to know how her dad died, even if he was a bad guy.” She opens up a few other things, too, the same documents she’d made Kate sign when she’d first come on as a linguistic consultant during the Fisk investigation. It’s not too hard to modify the language. “And you just said you kill people for a living. You’ll probably see something I haven’t.”

Elektra makes a face right out of her law school memories, all grumpy owl, a crumpled mouth and narrowed eyes. If she had feathers, they’d be puffed out. “You’re pacifying me with flattery.”

“And if this doesn’t work I’ll settle for shameless bribery, but just—let me work.”

There’s an odd cracking sound. After a second, Darcy blinks. _Wait, is that her laugh?_ She doesn’t remember Elektra laughing like that. It’d been a tinkling society girl thing back at Columbia, not whatever raven-inspired croak that was. Weirdly, it feels more real, this way. Elektra curls up to her feet, and drags the box off the floor. “You owe me for this, Lilith.”

“I figure it makes us square, considering the yakuza.” _Earbuds. iPod, god of music, please save me from this nightmare._ Her earbuds are all in knots when she drags it out from the bottom of her bag. “Don’t start working on that until you sign the things I just printed, all right, it could get us sued.”

“If I must,” says Elektra, and pulls her hair up into a high ponytail. “You still owe me.”

“I’ll buy you a muffin or something,” she says, and puts her earbuds in.

.

.

.

The phone rings.

“I was wondering if I would hear from you again.” Wherever Iris is, there’s a radio playing. Vanessa can’t make out the piece, but she thinks it might be Chopin. “You’ve been busy.”

“And you’ve been quiet.” There’s an odd unsettlement to her skin. Not her nerves, not really—she’s used to the pain of those, now, bears it without thinking, always aching and never really considering the reason why anymore—but above the skin, or just beneath it. Jittering like ants. “I’ve never heard Chinatown so silent.”

“I’m not restricted to the boundaries of Chinatown. You’re more than aware of that, or your men wouldn’t be coming across mine in East Harlem.”

“That’s true enough.” Vanessa curls her toes into the grass, and rolls her neck. The hammock shifts and bends under her weight. She shouldn’t be so nervous about it coming out from under her, she thinks. The trees that brace it are old, and strong, heavy things with deep roots. Still, she can’t shake the feeling that something is going to shatter, and she’ll go down with it. “What are your men doing in East Harlem, anyway? They seem unfriendly.”

“They don’t appreciate being interrogated by swaggering Irish,” says Iris. “I think you can appreciate that much, Vanessa.”

Vanessa lies back in the netting. “He’s a means to an end. And you didn’t answer my question.”

“Nor do I plan to.” Iris mutters something under her breath, not Mandarin but a dialect, something Vanessa can’t keep track of. “Brannigan is a snake, and he’ll turn and bite as soon as he gets a chance. He was much the same before he left for Ireland. He would have been better off dead, he makes things too complicated for you.”

“I can handle it. Besides, I can’t use his men without Brannigan at the helm.” She rocks, back and forth, knotting her toes up in the lawn. “The Irish are too loyal. It’s all families, paternalistic dynamics. Without the father, the gang breaks to pieces. It was the same when Wilson first started recruiting out of the Kitchen Irish. The Brannigans were the easiest to pick up, because Finn Brannigan was no longer there, and at the time his son was far too young to lead anyone without wetting himself.”

Iris snorts. “You have such a high opinion of your men, Vanessa. It’s a wonder any of them stay with you at all.”

“I have a low opinion of anyone who can’t keep up with elementary logic, regardless of gender,” says Vanessa sourly. “Brannigan, at least, is mostly grounded until his wounds heal or his body rots away. I’m not sure which it’ll be, at this point. His knee’s a ruin, even if his shoulder’s recovering. He’s keeping himself hidden until he can manage a confrontation, which is rational. The same idea doesn’t seem to extend to his men, however.”

“I heard about the policemen with the acid.” Something jingles, like a little bell. “Brannigan’s?”

“He didn’t order them to do it. If he had I probably would have lost my temper.” She picks a leaf off the ground. “Two men with a syringe full of acid, breaking into a hospital to poison a man who has little to no bearing on the world at large, just because he shot one of their brothers. A petty kind of revenge.”

“Are there other kinds?”

“If there weren’t, epics wouldn’t have been written about the glory of it.” She tears the leaf in half. “I’ve been considering rereading _The Count of Monte Cristo_ , if only for some inspiration.”

“I wouldn’t have thought you had time.”

“I have more time than I could ever manage,” says Vanessa. “In this house, day in, day out. The only people I see are the Guerras, and Christian. The most I can do is sit in the backyard, look at the sky. Sometimes I speak to the lawyers, or to Maya. I move men around like pawns on a chessboard, and the whole time I’m hundreds of miles from where I want to be. The only advantage about being out here is that Brannigan has no idea how to even begin tracking me down. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s contemplated having me killed.” She shreds one part of the leaf, and then the other, until it’s a pool of green on her bare collarbone. “I communicate with him by phone, and if he has questions, he directs them first to Maya. She is my emissary, in a way.”

“Your girl.” The radio snaps off. “She seemed overeager, when I saw her.”

“Maya thinks she has something to prove.”

“And does she?”

She pushes the hammock as far back as she can manage, and then releases, swaying over the earth. It’s bright, in Boston. The leaves are swaying in the trees. September, and the air is cooling, and the world has narrowed down to this house, and the backyard, and the sky. “She owes Wilson her sanity, and her speech, and quite possibly her life. He took her in after her father was killed, she won’t forget.”

“She might,” says Iris, “if she knew who killed him and why.”

Vanessa stops the hammock. The recoil burrows into her bones. “The trail is fifteen years old. Anyone who had anything to do with the matter is dead.”

“She’s been spending a great deal of time talking with Nelson, Murdock, and Lewis for a woman only looking into a simple racial discrimination suit.”

“The firm is a means to an end. Or so she says.”

“The firm is connected to the Devil and the Angel of Mercy. And now, again, to the Punisher. If it were me, I’d be wondering if she’s looking for something more than just advice on a bigoted security guard.”

Next door, wind chimes click together, ringing. “What are you calling for?” Vanessa weaves her fingers into the hammock. “It’s not in your character to offer information without wanting something in return. What is it you want, Iris?”

“You already owe me a great deal, Silvia Vanessa Manfredi.”

“My name,” says Vanessa, “is Vanessa Marianna. I hadn’t spoken to my father in years, before Wilson was imprisoned and I had to reestablish contact. I don’t wish to be remembered as Silvio Manfredi’s daughter.”

“And yet you use his name with Brannigan.”

“Because if Brannigan knew I was the Vanessa Marianna who stood alongside Wilson Fisk, he would never have agreed to working with me.” She pulls her feet up into the hammock. “I owe you for all you’ve done for me, Iris, and someday I know you’ll call in the debt, but here? Now, over this? What is it you want from me?”

“You’ve had no luck,” says Iris. “Finding my man.”

“One man in nearly seven billion,” says Vanessa. “It’s not like it’s easy.”

“You made me a promise, Vanessa.”

“It’s not as though the Rands are particularly difficult to find.”

“And yet,” she says, voice tight, “the one I want continues to elude all of us.”

“I don’t understand, are you trying to reprimand me or assist me?”

“Neither,” says Iris. “To warn you. The Rands are of little consequence in the current atmosphere. You’ve heard of the influx of yakuza in the city of late, I assume.”

“As much as I can translate, through Brannigan’s snarling.”

“What do you remember of the men who worked with Wilson?”

Wesley’s computer is sitting on the garden table. Vanessa doesn’t budge. “For the most part, that they were inept. Their leader was burned alive by the man in the black mask, and his primary aide fled. The families he’d brought with him, the Kobayashi and the Matsuhara, they fell apart without his leadership into squabbling.” She takes a breath. “The Orihara, on the other hand, vanished. So far as I can tell, they’re affiliated primarily with the Yoshioka, who for the most part remain in Japan, skimming credit card numbers out of ATM machines and trafficking women from surrounding Asian countries into snack bars and warehouses. My best guess is that after Hironobu Orihara died in that warehouse, they withdrew, and left the Kobayashi and the Matsuhara to their fate.”

“They do considerably more than that,” says Iris. “But for the most part, the yakuza are irrelevant to this conversation, aside from the identity of the man who leads them.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Hironobu Orihara,” says Iris. “It’s not the first name he’s stolen. He tends to favor identities that share that one character, _Nobu_. I suppose it makes it easier to keep track of himself, after so long.”

“Iris,” says Vanessa, “ _I don’t understand._ Hironobu Orihara is dead.”

“The body was never recovered.”

“His man Kim took it away with him, back to Japan.”

“He certainly went back to Japan, but he didn’t go to be left in some graveyard. His ashes are by no means gathering dust beneath a stone.”

It feels very distinctly similar to when she’d been very small, and she’d accidentally grabbed the line of an electric fence. Her hands are numb, and her muscles are jumping. “Iris, are you saying that Hironobu Orihara is alive?”

“The city has become much more complicated than the yakuza and the Irish, Vanessa. We all stand to lose a great deal, in the coming days.”

“Just tell me, Iris.” Her nails nip into her palm. _Iris,_ she realizes, _is nervous._ She’s never heard Iris nervous. She didn’t think Madame Gao was in the business of being nervous. “What’s going on?”

There’s an echoing kind of silence from the other end of the phone. A click, like a door shutting.

“What do you know of the Hand?” says Iris.

.

.

.

“You’re sure she’s okay,” says Miles again.

“I can hear you, you know.” Crouched down near the base of the graffiti, Elektra turns, her hair falling in her eyes. “You’re not being particularly quiet.”

“You’re playing the detective right now, aren’t you?” Darcy says. “Detect.”

Elektra makes the _don’t give me that shit_ look again, but turns back around to the wall, and resumes—well, resumes whatever it is she’s doing. To Darcy it just seems like she’s sitting there picking at bits of paint on the wall, but who knows, maybe there’s like…braille dots layered into the graffiti. She’s spent long enough staring at it, considering how much it makes her skin crawl.

( _Tell me what you have found out about the Black Sky._ )

It’d been a good two and a half hours before Darcy had managed to finish up enough shit to feel comfortable leaving the office again. Elektra hadn’t noticed; she’d been so deeply buried in the Willie Lincoln files (in spite of herself, considering how she’d schooled her face when Darcy had nudged her with her foot to get her attention) that she hadn’t said a word. As for the files themselves—“I need more time with these,” she’d said, and dumped them back into the box. “I have an idea, but I need to look into it. Give me two days.”

Which is way more effort than Darcy expected from her. _Whatever floats your boat, Natchios._

Matt hadn’t answered one phone call she’d made to him in the entirety of those two and a half hours, though, which is going to mean an…interesting conversation when he picks up all her voice mails. Karen had gone back to the hospital to meet with Frank about new questions, and Foggy had been so into his own files that he’d barely noticed when she’d knocked on the door to let him know they were leaving, so it’s just her and Elektra here, right now. And Miles, who’s been tailing them the whole way down. Either to protect her, Darcy thinks, which is…sweet, in its own way, or because he doesn’t trust Elektra further than he could throw a car.

(She may, possibly, look back on that analogy and laugh, but at the time it was valid, and she stands by the use of it.)

“Darcy,” says Miles, and Darcy snaps out of it. “You sure? Because she was trying to break into the roof, earlier, and I still don’t know how she managed to get up there without anybody noticing.”

“From the next building over.” Elektra doesn’t lift her head. “It’s not as though it’s particularly difficult.”

“Elektra’s a specialist.” That makes her sound legit, which she’s not (unless you count legitimately terrifying as an option) but, y’know. It’s the only thing that works that doesn’t sound like she’s lying through her teeth. “She knows what she’s doing, Miles, don’t worry.”

“She still didn’t have to come in through the roof.”

“She’s an eccentric specialist.”

On the ground, Elektra scoffs.

“I asked her to look into it, don’t worry about Elektra. She’s helping me with that thing that Kate is working on at the moment.” Like that’s not sketch as all hell. “She’s dealt with this sort of thing before, she just wanted to take a look at the graffiti and the building and see if everything’s up to speed.”

“Uh-huh.” He pinches his lower lip. “What’s she specialize in, again?”

“Life insurance,” says Elektra, and snaps a knife out of the top of her boot.

“Do you always pay attention to who comes in and out of the roof access door?” Bingo; Miles’s shoulders climb up around his ears, and he ducks his head rather than look at her, scuffing one combat boot across the floor of the basement. “Not that I don’t admire the dedication, but I thought you worked and stuff. Seems kinda weird to hang out in the roof stairs when you’re at home.”

“I wasn’t,” says Miles. Elektra scrapes her knife against the paint, and frowns at the color beneath. “Not exactly. I go up to the roof sometimes to think, and I heard someone picking the lock.”

“You know what someone picking a lock sounds like?”

His jaw sets. “I watch TV.”

“Elektra won’t be coming in the roof access door anymore,” says Darcy. “On pain of dismemberment and possibly getting arrested. She’ll use the front door, like a normal person—”

“Hah,” says Elektra.

“—she _will_ use the front door,” Darcy says again, “if she needs to come back. You did a good job, Miles.”

Slowly, his shoulders drop, down and away from his earlobes. “I mean, Elena asked me to help, so.”

“Where is Elena, by the way?”

“Upstairs baking, I think.” Miles pinches his lip again. “I didn’t tell her you were here, I didn’t know if—”

 _If Elektra was kosher_ , she thinks, and pats his elbow. “I’ll go see her on my way out. Thanks for keeping an eye on things, Miles, seriously. We all appreciate it.”

Miles hooks his hands into the pockets of his hoodie. “I—haven’t seen Kate. Lately.”

 _Oh,_ Darcy thinks, looking at him. He’s very defiantly not meeting her eyes, turned his face to the blank wall near the water heater and fixing his eyes on the piping, the cabinets. _Oh my god. College boy with a crush._ She’s not sure if that’s cute, or worrying (it’s Kate, Kate has a history, she’s not sure if she should be worried or not but she kind of is, damn it), or irritating, considering how very much they _don’t_ need more romantic entanglement bullshit at the moment. “She’s been busy. She should be around as soon as we get some things done.”

And again with the scoffing from the peanut gallery. “Miss Bishop has bigger things to worry about than this building,” says Elektra, and chips a few bits of paint off the wall into her palm. “Don’t underestimate how long it should take to fix.”

“What’s wrong?” Miles rubs a hand over the back of his head. “I mean—I could help, if you wanted.”

“I think we have it covered, Miles. Besides, you’re already helping by keeping an eye on things here. If we need anything, we’ll let you know.”

There. That’s about as blatant a _go away_ as she can manage without actually strong-arming him out the door. He knows it, too, judging by the look on his face, but Miles ducks and goes. He shuts the door the same way Foggy does when he’s pissed—I.E., very, very gently—but at least he goes. Darcy waits until the footsteps have faded down the hall before pushing her glasses up into her hair to rub at her eyes.

“Elena’s the old woman from the Tully case,” says Elektra, digging in with her knife again. “Right?”

“Elena Cardenas. She lives on the third floor. She’s the building super, now that Kate owns the place.” And she’s not going to introduce Elena to Elektra, for many reasons, but primarily at this point she kind of wants to avoid the _so when are you and Senor Murdock getting married_ discussion with Matt’s ex _listening to all of it_. “Miles is a college student, he lives on the floor above.”

“Does he know?” Elektra snaps her flick-knife closed, and shoves it back into her shoe. “About Lilith.”

“Not that I’m aware of. This is only the second time I’ve talked to him, to be honest. He’s been keeping an eye on the graffiti just in case.”

Elektra shakes the flakes of paint off her hands, clapping them over her pants. “Do you trust him?”

“As much as I trust anyone who hasn’t actively tried to kill me. Or been an asshole.” There are little flaws in the graffiti now, marks where Elektra swiped her knife. Weirdly, it makes her palms sweat more, rather than less. “Like I said, this is only the second time I’ve talked to him.”

“Hm,” says Elektra, and draws her hand down the second stroke in the field radical for _black._ “What about the old woman upstairs, does she know?”

“God, I hope not. She knows Fisk wanted me dead, the same way he wanted her dead, but other than that, I think I’ve managed to keep the rest of it a secret. And she definitely doesn’t know about Matt, before you ask.”

“I see.” She rubs her thumb along the downward stroke in the second half of _sora_ , the one that looks like a capital I. “It’s just interesting, that’s all.”

“What is?”

“How many people who seem to know.” Elektra knocks on the wall a few times, and then bounces on the balls of her feet, as if she’s testing the stability of the concrete. “It’s a miracle you haven’t been discovered yet, with all these people who know.”         

“Meaning it’s a miracle no one’s stabbed me in the back and sold the info to the highest bidder.”

Elektra shrugs with only one shoulder. “You said it, not me.”

“Well, I mean. Considering the number of people I know, the list isn’t that big.” She kind of wants a tennis ball. Maybe throwing a stupid green ball at the graffiti over and over again would make her less nauseous. “And none of them would ever say anything.”

“You’re sure about that, are you?”

“As sure as I can be without crawling in their heads and physically wiping the information from their brains, yeah.” Half of the people on that list are her family, including Jen, apparently, and the other half—Claire wouldn’t tell. Neither would Santino. Jess and Trish and Malcolm? No. Melvin and Betsy don’t even know her real name. Speaking of, she needs to text Betsy and see where Melvin is with the whip, they’re going on two weeks of overcomplicated stuff and if it’s too hard for him she might just withdraw her request. _Like that won’t offend his inventor sensibilities._ “Why do you keep petting the wall?”

“I wondered if they’d painted something else, but—no.” She doesn’t turn around. “If your translator is right, and they really do plan on digging a hole here, it seems silly to think that they’d mark the wall in the first place. Unless they wanted this particular spot set aside from the rest.”

“It’s a boiler room. If they’re tearing the building to pieces inside, it seems irrelevant.”

“Unless there’s a very specific calculation they’ve made and want to keep track of.” Elektra wets her thumb, and smooths it over the wall. “Heard from Matthew yet?”

Darcy, halfway through putting her phone back into her bag, stills. She forces herself to let go of the cell phone. “No. His phone’s off.”

“It’s been three hours.”

“He was going to a meeting with a client, I’m not worried.”

Elektra puts her hands to her hips, not looking away from the graffiti. “I’m surprised you even get reception down here.”  

“This building’s weird sometimes.”

“Clearly, considering the Yoshioka are so interested in it.” Elektra drums her fingers against her hipbone. “What else does Kate Bishop keep in the basement?”

“Laundry room’s next door. There’s a big empty room a few doors down, where she wants to put in like—exercise shit, but not until we get a better idea of what’s going on and whether or not the equipment’s going to be stolen.” She picks at her scar. “If you’re gonna be any longer in here, though, I might wait outside.”

The pause, Darcy thinks, is actually tangible. Almost a pregnant thing in the air. “Does it make you uncomfortable?” says Elektra. “Being here.”

Loaded questions ahoy, Batman. Which piece is she supposed to be most uncomfortable about: the fact that this is Elektra, Matt’s ex, and the whole incident with the party is still kind of fresh in her mind; the fact that this is Elektra, who tried to get Matt to kill someone, and she’s still not sure why and it’s making Matt petty and uncomfortable; the fact that this is Elektra looking into the yakuza graffiti, in particular Black Sky graffiti, which already makes her palms sweat; or a random combination of all of the above? She’s not even sure anymore. “I don’t like looking at it,” she says. “The graffiti.”

“It’s only paint.” Elektra crouches, and draws her fingers along the base of the wall again. “Not like paint can hurt you.”

( _Tell me what you have found out about the Black Sky._ )

“Fear isn’t all that logical,” says Darcy. “It just kind of happens and you deal with it. I just—I really don’t like being in here, so if you’re going to be much longer—”

“No, I’m finished with this.” Elektra sways back to her feet, all cobra, and shoves her hands right back into the pockets of her leather jacket. (Because apparently, she has one of those, and it’s a lot bulkier than Darcy expected it to be considering how Elektra dresses the rest of the time.) “I want to look on the other floors, too.”

“There hasn’t been any other graffiti anywhere that we know of.”  

“They wouldn’t have just painted this for no reason. It’s out of character for them to leave such an open claim in territory that doesn’t belong to them.” She has to trot to catch up. Elektra’s not taller than her out of heels, not really, but for some reason her stride eats up ground like a goat through newspaper, even indoors. “You said they had people stationed in the building?”

“Yeah, the Ahagons on the first floor, but McClintock told them to keep their noses clean and their mouths shut for the moment. We’re leaving them there just in case they do something stupid and we can catch them at it.” She watches as Elektra opens a dryer, slams it closed. “You think they’ll have hidden something in the dryer?”

“I once found throwing knives taped to the back of a refrigerator,” says Elektra. “They’re innovative.”

“All right, then.”

“Matthew told me what happened to you.” Elektra goes up on her toes, leans over one of the washing machines to get a look down the back. “Or some of it, anyway, he wasn’t specific. With Nobu Yoshioka.”

Her tongue prickles, just a little. “Yeah, he—mentioned that.” Darcy clears her throat. “The whole thing with Nobu, and—and with Fisk, it was complicated. But, y’know, I survived.”

“Clearly.” Elektra opens a washer in the middle of a cycle, looks down at the mess of neon, and then slams the lid closed again. “Not without scars.”

“Yeah, well, scars happen. I’m sure you have your own.”

Elektra’s lips go tight. She shuts up. It’s a minor miracle, Darcy thinks, because there are so many ways that she could have responded to that one, but Elektra shuts up, and keeps on going through the washer and dryer sets, her eyebrows vanishing beneath her hair, mouth pursed, lime-sour.

They’ve gone through three floors and found exactly squat when Elektra (carrying a folding chair she “borrowed” from the supply closet under one arm) says, “Ask me.”

 _Fuck, fuck, fucking hell. Just crack my head open and pour oil into it, I don’t even care anymore._ “Ask you what?”

“About any of it.” Elektra snaps the chair open, and then boosts herself up, balancing on her heels so she can uncap the cover of a smoke detector. She has to stretch to reach it, but she manages. Darcy has to fight off an instinct to hold the chair, her stomach swirling. _The more time I spend with heights, the less capable I am of managing the whole thing._ “The house, the party. Roscoe Sweeney.” It’s almost a purr. “I know you want to ask. You’re too curious. You won’t be able to stop thinking about it until you know, and the only way you _could_ know the whole of it is to ask me.” She glances at Darcy through her lashes again, waiting. “So. Ask me.”

Christ. Enough with awkward questions today, for God’s sake. “Would you actually give me a straight answer if I did?”

“Depends on how you phrase it, Lilith.”

“Why do you keep calling me that?” It bursts out of her, torn, ripped away. A stupid question, in the face of everything else, but the thought of _voicing_ any of the rest of it—the house, Roscoe Sweeney, Matt, the party, all of it—it makes her whole stomach knot into something the size and density of a fifty-cent piece. “You keep calling me Lilith, why are you calling me Lilith? You know my name.”

Elektra peers up into the smoke detector, and then screws the lid back on. “Isn’t that who you are? Why shouldn’t I call you that?”

 _All the time. Always. I’m always Lilith._ But she tries very hard not to show that, not to anyone but Matt. Having Elektra call her Lilith is…weird. “You’ve been super twitchy all day about how many people know me by that name, but it’s all you call me. It just seems weird.” 

“I abhor disguises.” She bounces off the chair, lands on her toes. “You’re Lilith. No sense in naming you otherwise.”

“Is this one of those mutant rights things about not going by human slave-names, because I’m pretty sure that fad went out with the early two-thousands.” Her palms are sweaty, and it’s vile. “And anyway, I’m not a mutant, born or made. I’m just me.”

“You’re not a mutant,” Elektra says. “No.”

There’s not much she can say to that.

“You weren’t anyone, really,” says Elektra. “You were the girl in the hat. Four years ago you would never have imagined doing this.”

“You have no idea what was going on in my head four years ago, Elektra. Not four years ago or fourteen or any of it.” The root of her tongue aches. “I’ve always been me. There’s nothing particularly complicated about it.”

Elektra hisses through her teeth. “You don’t make sense. Your choices don’t make sense. I don’t understand you.”

And that might actually really piss her off, not understanding. “There’s not much to understand. I get angry about things.”

“You never used to.”

“Maybe I did,” says Darcy. “Maybe I’m just better at hiding things than you thought I was.”

Elektra cracks through her teeth, and stalks off down the hall.

“Is this why you came in to the firm after Matt was out of the building?” She _hates_ having to jog to keep up. “You wanted to talk to me and try to figure me out, didn’t you? You waited until Matt was gone and then you came in and waited for me to get back.”

“Well done,” says Elektra, and snaps out the chair at the next smoke detector. “Ten points to Gryffindor.”

“What is it you want to know?” Darcy stops, almost skidding on the wood. Which would have sucked, because ouch. “You want to know why I do this? Or—or why I trust other people with it, or why any of it happened? What is so _confusing_ about this to you?”

“All of that is irrelevant.”

“I don’t know that it is, because from where I’m standing, you’re pissed because you made an error in judgment and now you’re having trouble fixing it.”

Elektra scoffs, but there’s a twist to her lips that reads _bull’s eye._ “You overestimate how much that would irritate me.”

“Do you hate me?” Darcy says, and Elektra, halfway up onto the chair again, stops. “Because if you hate me, I would get why. I would hate me, at least a little.”

“You’re infuriating.” Elektra heaves herself up onto the chair. “Don’t you ever stop talking?”

“No one’s figured out the off-switch yet, so I guess not.”

Elektra blows her hair out of her eyes. “Hating you would mean caring enough to think about it.”

“I don’t know whether I should laugh or scream _bullshit_ but either way that was weak.”

“It’s rich that _you’re_ asking _me_ if I hate you,” Elektra says. She has to spit hair out of her mouth to do it, which she somehow manages to make look dignified instead of ridiculous. _Which is not. Fair._ “You should hate me. Matthew hates me.”

“I don’t hate you, Elektra,” Darcy says, and in the saying of it realizes—crap. It’s actually true. She’s been telling herself this for days, _I don’t hate Elektra, I don’t,_ but now that she says it aloud, here, it’s actually real. She doesn’t hate Elektra Natchios. “I’m pissed as hell at you and I don’t understand you and honestly I kind of wish you’d never come back because of all the shit that’s gone down since, but I don’t hate you.”

“If you did hate me,” Elektra says, “I wouldn’t care.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t.” _So how about them apples, Natchios._ “And I’m not all that sure Matt does either, but that isn’t the point.”

“Isn’t it?” Back down, and the chair is snapped together again. Elektra heaves it up under her arm. “You ought to hate me, considering what he told you. And I know he did, he said so. The whole of it, from start to finish, every last speck.” She spits it out. “You should hate me, Lilith.”

“Do you want me to hate you, is that it?” She can’t help it. Darcy screeches between her teeth. “ _Jesus_. I don’t get it, is that what you want to hear? I don’t get why you did what you did, with Sweeney, and I don’t know that I ever will, but—fuck.”

“But _what_?”

“I am _trying_ , all right? I am trying really damn hard not to judge you on the fly, because I’ve done that before—” _with Frank,_ she thinks, _with Grotto_ “—and every time it’s bitten me in the ass. But I can’t help you if you keep trying to yank you, _and_ me, _and_ Matt into this stupid fucking cat-and-mouse game of trying to piss each other off.”

Elektra scoffs. “That’s one way to put it.”

She wants to bang her head against the wall. “Jesus fuck a duck—I get that your parents died and I get that you’re upset, but I swear to God, Elektra, I _will_ punch you if you keep doing this—”

“My father,” she says, “was an utter bastard, and I don’t give a shit that he’s dead. Or my mother. I was nothing to either of them, and they were nothing to me.”

That’s that, then. “I don’t get what you want me to say.”

“Not everything is about you.”

“Matt, then,” says Darcy, and Elektra turns her face away. “This is about Matt?”

“Matthew is a fool,” Elektra says, “and naïve, if he thinks that you—”

She stops. 

“That’s what this is, isn’t it,” Darcy says, and her heart’s beating too fast, rushing in her throat, tumbling down and down into something sharper than fury, bluer than fear. “You’re angry because of me and Matt.”

“Nothing so petty.”

“Not the relationship, not—not that, you’re not angry because of that, but—” she swallows. “You’re angry because of what we do.”

“No,” says Elektra.

“You’re hurt because you spent all this time being alone—”

“You don’t know anything about me,” Elektra says, but Darcy shakes her head.

“I know that you thought Matt understood you,” she says. “That he was the only person who could. But it turned out he couldn’t, or you didn’t understand him, or—or both of them, I don’t know, so you left, and you’ve been gone ever since. I don’t think you even _want_ our help, but you know you need it, so you asked anyway.”

“I would stop if I were you.”

“So this is you,” Darcy says. “You’re hurt and you’re pissed because you ran to wherever the hell you’ve been the past four years and you spent all that time thinking that he was the only person who could understand you and that you were the only person who could understand him and you came back and he wasn’t right where you left him, anymore—”

“Shut _up_ ,” Elektra says, and it’s low and hoarse, like how Matt says it sometimes, when someone’s pushed right past Matt Murdock and into the Devil, “you’re wrong—”

“—and I can’t imagine how that would feel, Elektra, no matter what you’ve done, but I swear, if you keep doing this, if you keep pushing at all of us like this, he _will_ hate you—”

“ _Stop it_!”

“—and if I’m right then that’s the last thing you want, and it doesn’t help anyone for you to keep doing this, so will you just fucking quit this stupid _bullshit_!”

The hall’s dead silent. Elektra stares at her, unblinking, teeth bared, but it’s not threatening, not really. More like she’s frozen, like she’s forgotten, like she’s so stuck in staring that she doesn’t remember how it might look. Darcy’s face is too hot, her neck is blazing, and her hands are shaking where she’s clenched them up into fists at her sides. Slowly, Elektra wets her lips.

“The last person who spoke to me that way wound up dead,” she says. “I want you to know that.”

“You’re not going to kill me, Elektra.”

“No. But I could break your wrist.”

“You could try,” says Darcy, “but it wouldn’t be all that fun for either of us.”

Silence again. Slowly, Elektra’s lips curve, up and up, until she’s actually smiling. Not a threat, or a forgotten thing, but a real smile, an odd little curl at the corner. _Shadows,_ Darcy thinks, _behind people’s eyes and smiles,_ but this isn’t shadow, not really. It’s a strange, lingering sadness.

“Singapore,” she says.

“What?”

“I was in Singapore.” Elektra heaves the chair up under her arm again. “Among other places, but mostly I was in Singapore.”

Darcy blinks. “Why Singapore?”

The sad little echo gets deeper, louder. “Because,” she says. “It was about as far away as I could get.”

 _I have no idea what to say to that. What the hell am I supposed to say to that?_ She looks at the floor, at the wood that Kate had put in, fresh and much cleaner than the linoleum that used to be here, real wood over the grime. Her face hurts, and her throat hurts, and her ears are burning, and she’s not sure if it’s a flush from fury or from trying to hold back all her frustration or from something else entirely, some kind of grief she can’t explain, even to herself.

“I want to get through all the floors of this building before five o’clock,” says Elektra. “We should keep moving. If you’re going to keep on watching me look at smoke detectors.”

… _wait, what_? “You still want me around?”

“I’m almost certain that your do-gooder friend will hustle me out of the building if he finds me wandering without you,” she says. “Don’t think I can escape at the moment.”

It could be an olive branch, or it could be a knife to spin and jab between her ribs, but at the moment, Darcy’s pretty sure it’s the former. She clears her throat, and straightens, puts her shoulders back. Elektra’s watching her, whatever trace of loss that she’d left on her face scrubbed away with the fury. It takes a few tries to work moisture back into her mouth. “Do you want me to carry the chair?”

“I’ll carry the damn chair,” says Elektra. “You might want to think about telling your sticky bun of a partner that I haven’t left you to bleed out in a dumpster. I get the impression that’s what he thought was going to happen, this afternoon.”

“Pretty sure Foggy wasn’t imagining that,” Darcy says, but she sends him a text anyway, just in case.

.

.

.

_One week ago._

“Shit,” Foggy says.

Karen doesn’t have words anymore.

“ _Shit_.” He fists his hands in his hair, hides his face. “Shit—what did you _say?_ ”

“I didn’t say anything!”

“He was fine! Fifteen minutes ago he was fine and I don’t know what happened, I didn’t—”

(“I have your dog,” she’d said, and Frank had blinked at her a few times before cocking his head. Not in the same way Darcy and Matt and Kate do, that’s all cat. This was curious and confused and half-human again and she doesn’t know what to _do_ with a look like that on a man like this, she really doesn’t. Some part of her thinks this might have been what she’d been trying to prove, Frank Castle’s humanity.

“My dog?”

“The pit bull.” Karen had wet her lips. “Darcy said she was yours.”

Frank laughed again. “Dog belongs to herself.”)

“—do anything,” Karen says, but it comes out battery acid sour. “I didn’t tell him to do _anything_ , Foggy, I went through everything you said, he didn’t say he was going to—”

“Christ.” He’s still hiding in his hands. “Fucking Christ.”

“Should we call—”

“I need to go to the courthouse and see if I can file for an extension, something, I don’t know—Reyes is going to try and fast-track this and that is the absolute last—fucking _hell_.” His voice is going high, high and crackling, and Karen can’t help but think of Foggy a year ago, Foggy pacing back and forth when Darcy had been snatched out of Elena’s building, and Matt had gone somewhere they could not follow, and they’d been alone in the office waiting for news with nothing but silence between them. “Fucking—I need to go to court. Someone—I don’t know.”

It’s after seven. The office is closed. Still, Karen says, “I’ll go back to the firm and—and look at files.” Look through files. Go over lists of dead bodies. Remind herself how terrible this could be. _First degree murder, dozens and dozens, any number of minor felonies, God, what are we going to do, how could he plead not guilty, how—_ but she knows, doesn’t she? _Not guilty_ means it all has to be gone over, every scrap of it, everything dragged out into the light. _Not guilty_ means a spotlight is shined over the whole of it, and whatever link Reyes has to the death of Frank’s family has to be pulled into the sun again. If they play it right, anyway. _Not guilty_ might be Frank Castle’s only chance to learn the truth at all.

“Yeah.” Foggy’s eyes are veined red, and there’s exhaustion in his bones. “Yeah, I’ll—if you want. You know what you’re looking for.”

“Mm.” There’s a look on his face—God, Foggy might be _disappointed._ In her, maybe. In the world. Either way it scrapes her bloody. “Okay.”

“I’ll tell them. When I hear from them.”

 _Darcy and Matt._ Out working somewhere, doing something, doing _anything_ but this, standing in an empty hospital lobby with Frank Castle and Samantha Reyes hanging in the air between them. Karen nods. “Okay.”

“Not your fault, Karen,” he says, and that rankles. Karen makes herself smile, fisting her hand around the straps of her purse.

“I know.”

Foggy opens his mouth, and shuts it again. He squeezes her elbow. Then he’s out on the sidewalk, flagging down a cab ( _red,_ she thinks, _we’re too deep in the red for that, Foggy, Foggy, Foggy, don’t_ —) and disappearing into the interior. Red brake lights fade into the distance.

Karen walks.

They’d left Rey in the office. Chat had been very careful to tell Rey the rules of being inside, and where she could and could not go, what she could and could not do, but it means that when Karen unlocks the door (and she always locks it, now, when she’s alone here, no matter how much she’s learned from Matt and Darcy in the way of physical defense) she’s jumping for a walk. She sticks her nose into Karen’s legs and skirt and sniffs her, and Karen drops and puts her arms around Rey’s thin neck, breathing in the smell of dog and the thick fabric of the collar. “Smell something new?” she says into Rey’s fur, and Rey wiggles and cries a little, like a puppy. The longer she’s gone without being hit, the younger she seems. This, Karen thinks—this is what a six-month-old dog should be, wriggly and everywhere, a tail going a hundred miles an hour. “Sorry. I was in a hospital. It’s probably gross.”

Rey knocks her head hard into Karen’s chest.

“He’s awake now,” she says to the dog. Karen’s not entirely sure how much Rey can actually understand, no matter what Chat had said. Still, she thinks Rey might get a little bouncier after hearing it. “And he did something really—really fucking reckless. Sounds familiar?”

Rey sneezes, which ends _that_ little conversation. Karen snags the leash off the top of her desk (she’d left out MSM suit files, which had been sloppy of her, but she’d figured, you know, maybe an hour out of the office, not the whole day, not this goddamn late) and lets Rey drag her outside.   

They’ve gone four blocks when the footsteps sound out behind her, sharp and fast. She’s digging into her purse for the .380 (she’s been carrying it, more and more, trying to keep it on her, just in case) when the streetlamp casts light over Ben’s face. The jumpiness won’t go away, even when she forces her fingers off the gun. “Ben. Have you heard about—”

“Are you _crazy_?” Ben says, seizing her by the arm.

“I don’t—”

“My contact in the DA’s office called me. The normal one, not the mole. Don’t even try to weasel out of this one.” He shakes his head. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? The four of you are _insane_.”

“He wasn’t supposed to plead not guilty, he didn’t—”

“ _Insane._ ” He’s gripping her elbow hard enough to leave a mark, Karen thinks. “I leave you people alone for five minutes thinking you can handle your shit—”

“Ben—”

“—not counting the digging that Kate was having me do, because that doesn’t count, that’s typical Kate—and then I get a text from Selina Kyle saying _oh, don’t be angry, Ben, but we’re taking on the Punisher’s case, and it’s going to trial next week_!”

It’s stupid, but the only thing she can think to say is, “Darcy doesn’t know that yet.”

“Yeah, where the hell is she? If I’m going to lecture one of you I’m going to make it count and make it _all_ of you, because Christ, you need someone who has a single ounce of common sense.”

 _With Elektra. With Matt. Going against the yakuza._ Which needs to be done, but God, God, she wants both of them here, it’s supposed to be the four of them going into this, not just her and Foggy— “Working.”

“Of course she is.” He looks like he wants to shake her. “Jesus Christ. This is stupid and cocky and reckless and it could screw her and it could screw you, and Murdock, and Nelson, and Kate, and me, and anyone else who’s caught up in this, what the _hell_ was she thinking hooking up with this case—”

“I’m the one who wanted to do it,” Karen snaps, “don’t be angry with Darcy—”

“And that’s something to say, that a legal assistant has so much influence over her firm that they take cases depending on whether or not she wants!”

“Stop shouting at me,” Karen says. “Frank Castle may be a lot of things, but he’s not insane and he doesn’t deserve to die for what he’s done.”

“Lots of families out there who don’t believe that, Karen.”

She yanks her elbow out of his grip. “Something is going _on_. The District Attorney is covering her ass and trying to get Frank killed doing it, something _happened_ and it’s because of her and regardless of what Frank did, Ben, he deserves answers, and if a trial is a way to drag that all out into the open—”

“Jesus.” He pushes his glasses up his forehead, and rubs at his eyes. “Karen, a trial doesn’t just drag all of that out into the open. A trial like this one could _ruin_ the firm, in a way that Reyes couldn’t manage. If she overpowers them in court, instead of shady tactics and all the bullshit she pulls outside, nobody will want to hire them again. If _anything_ goes wrong in this case the firm will be dead in the water. Not to mention that putting _Lilith—_ ” he drops his voice, hisses so low that it could be imaginary “—in the same courtroom as the _Punisher_ and expect people to not put it together is like putting a knife in Fisk’s hands and asking him not to flay you alive!”

“He’s not going to give her up.” Her heart’s beating fast enough to hurt, exploding in her chest. “He knows who Darcy is and he protected her, Ben, he’s not going to say anything—”

“ _Christ._ ”

“—and even if he did people—people think he’s crazy, no one would believe him—”  

“It’s not that hard to put together that the law firm that took down Wilson Fisk is linked to Daredevil and Lilith. People are already doing it. You know how many emails I get a day asking if I know either of them? If I can put someone in touch with them? You know how many _dozens_ of emails I get from people who don’t think they have anywhere else to go, Karen? I can’t count them anymore. I read through every one of their stories, all their lives and wounds and traumas, and I have to shut them down and ignore them and tell them no because that will _protect_ them, it’ll keep their names and faces from being blazed all over New York, keep all of you from getting knives in your back in dark alleys walking home at night, and by putting yourselves between Frank Castle and the world you have put yourself in a spotlight that you _cannot take away_. People will crawl all over your lives, your backgrounds, your freaking SAT scores, and they _will_ start to put things together, and now that the ball’s been set rolling you _cannot stop it_. You can just hope to hell nobody’s smart enough to make the leap.”

“They did all that back when we were working with Kate and we were fine.”

His mouth thins out. “Yeah, and when you were working with Kate, you were working with a victim. You were against the Goodmans, who were trying to strong-arm their way into keeping her quiet through attacking Lewis. You weren’t anywhere _close_ to defending someone like the Punisher. It’s nowhere near the same, and I know you’re smart enough to get the difference.”

The last time she felt like this, she’d been ten years old and her favorite teacher had caught her cheating on a math test. _I will not cry,_ she tells herself, and she bites her tongue hard enough to sting. _I refuse to cry._ At her feet, Rey circles, and presses hard into her calf like she’s trying to prop Karen up with her bones. Ben stares at her, resettling his glasses on his nose. He rubs his hands over his face.

“Christ, all of you are so young.”

“I don’t feel young,” Karen says. _I can’t feel young, not after everything._

“That’s the problem. You never feel it, no matter how young you are, because in that moment you’re the oldest you’ve ever been.”

Her eyes are burning. Karen stares hard over Ben’s shoulder into the street. Two weeks ago, she’d flung herself into Ben’s car with Elliot Grote and driven away and the rear window had shattered in on their heads. Two weeks.

“You want the truth,” Ben says. “You want the truth, I want the truth. Castle wants the truth. The whole firm wants the truth. But this is reckless and stupid and if a single one of us makes one mistake it could screw us all.”

“I know.”

“Every single one of you gets it into your head that you have the best idea for how to go forward and it always winds up biting you in the ass.”

Karen scowls. “Fisk tried to kill you, too, you don’t get to say that.”

“The hell I don’t. I’m almost forty years older than you. I’m the only one who gets to say it.” He rubs at his eyes again. “Okay. Did you get Castle’s side of the story? In its entirety.”

“As much as he remembers. Some of it’s blurry.”

“Still more than we had before. Can’t go after the people involved without witness statements. The DA is going to try and bury you in miscellanea, it’s her style, and if she’s going to be the one prosecuting—which it seems like that’s how the wind is blowing, lucky bastards that you are—you’re going to have to be prepared to fight for every goddamn detail. She wants the reality buried and her sham story shouted from the rooftops, and you will have to _drag_ the truth out of wherever she’s trying to hide it, even if it’s only in bits and pieces.”

“We know that.”

“There’s a difference between knowing it and doing it in court.” He sighs. “You’re not a lawyer, you’re not protected by attorney-client privilege. You tell me anything about what went on in there you could get your ass sued by the prosecution.”

“I could get my ass sued for a lot of things, Ben.” She bites her lip. “But—hm.”

“What?”

“Jen resigned today,” Karen says, and Ben’s eyes go glass sharp.

“You’re joking. _Jen Walters_ resigned.”

“In protest.” She licks her lips. “Jen might be willing to talk.”

“Not legal.”

“No, but she’s—” _When you’re ready to tell me_ , she’d said, _I’ll be around._ “The law might not be working all that well for her right now.”

“So you’re planning on taking advantage of your roommate in a fragile state for information about the District Attorney covering up a mass shooting in Central Park.”

Karen tips her head—like Darcy, like Matt—and says, “You’d have come up with it eventually.”

“You’re a cocky shit.”

“Why do I have to be cocky? Why can’t I be plucky? Nancy Drew is plucky. Hildy Johnson is plucky.”

“Plucky implies a certain level of optimism you don’t have anymore,” Ben says. “You’re too bitter and hag-like to manage plucky.”

“I wouldn’t cover the burning of Rome for you,” says Karen, strangely light, “if it were just lighting up.”

“Christ, I wish we were on the burning of Rome. The burning of Rome would be easy. The burning of Rome won’t get us shot in the back.”

“Chin up, Ben, we could get shot in the front instead. At least then we’ll see it coming.”

“Leave the gallows humor for the gallows, Page,” he says. “Let’s catch Jen Walters before she gets the law back in her spine.”


	13. Ouija Says N O P E

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, guys! Sorry this took so long. Coming up on the end of the semester/start of summer vacation, for me, so I've had like...no time. And plus brainweird. And very happy things. And. Things. 
> 
> /waves flag
> 
> First note! There's a TSoD playlist up on my 8tracks. Link at the bottom. 
> 
> Second note, I messed up a little last chapter, said that Karen went to the prison and not the hospital. Sorry. She went to the hospital to visit Frank. Frank doesn't leave the hospital for another few days because Darcy fucked up his knee like wow. XD 
> 
> Aaaaaand third note: Content warnings! Please be on the lookout for blood, some graphic descriptions of what happened to Frank's family (though not...as graphic as they could be considering what happens to Frank's family), some references to alcohol, torture, interrogation, stabbing (Elektra, bb, c'mon), manipulative stuffs, some gaslighting (thanks, Vanessa), references to drugs, PTSD stuff, antisemitism, Islamophobia, hate crimes, anxiety, major depressive disorder (Clint, bb, my dumpster bird), and looooooads of drive-bys by other 616 characters. (I stand by Misty, I do, and if that gets retconned by IF, idgaf. Brett and Misty as boss-ass coworkers makes me happy inside.).
> 
> I have taken certain minor liberties with what is colloquially known as the Spider Sense, but I feel like they're within the realm of credibility. 
> 
> /jazz hands

Matt is capital U Unhappy with finally picking up his phone (an hour after she and Elektra parted ways outside of the tenement, having somehow, miraculously, not murdered in each other in the hallway) to learn that he’d missed the entire debacle.

“I can take care of myself,” Darcy says, tucking the phone between her ear and her shoulder to fumble her keys out of her pocket. “Besides, I keep telling you, Elektra’s not gonna lay a hand on me. I wouldn’t let her, first of all, which you know, it’s not like I’m completely incapable—”

“I’m not saying you are—”

“—and secondly you’d be pissed at her if she tried it, and I think that carries a lot more weight with her than you actually want to think about.” Or that she wants to think about, really, but just— _next thing, Lewis._ “I tried calling you, your phone was off, and it’s not like I could put it off until you came back when I didn’t even know when you were _going_ to come back. It worked out the way it worked out, Matt. No muss, no fuss, no knives to the throat. Everything’s cool.”

“Not a great metaphor,” Matt says. “Really not.”

“She’s not going to hurt me, and she’s not going to hurt you. She can’t do this on her own.” _And I think she still has feelings for you, which is…uncomfortable._ “I’m fine. And honestly, I don’t think it’s gonna happen again. Foggy nearly had a complete meltdown, so if we can like—make sure she knows not to come into the firm without calling first, that’d be great.”

Matt’s silent, shudderingly so. Then he says, “You’re okay?”

“I’m fine.” Wrong key. She fits the right one into the door of the firm. “Are you?”

Silence again, for a full breath. “Fine,” he says, after a moment. His voice is incredibly weird, but she lets it go. Finding out that your current girlfriend and your ex-girlfriend (who tried to get you to kill someone, because that’s not something that can be dismissed all that easily, no matter about the whole hurt feelings and Singapore bomb) wound up spending upwards of three hours wandering through a tenement in search of clues about yakuza plots is kind of incredibly weird. Makes sense. “Feel stupid for turning my phone off.”

“You were in a meeting.”

“Yeah, well, it’s going on silent, next time,” he says, and he sounds so put out about it that she has to bite her tongue to keep from laughing. Pause. “I’m—going to be late, back to the office.”

“Matt—”

“I’m not going to talk to Elektra.” That, at least, is a regular Matt voice. The _God, why would you say that_ voice. “No, I’m gonna—I have to meet up with someone. I won’t be more than an hour, I don’t think. Can you make an excuse to Foggy for me?”

“So long as you don’t make this a regular thing, probably. He’s gonna notice if you’re late more than once, and he’s already had a bad day with Elektra showing up and being slinky and making comments for like…more than an hour.” There’s a note on Karen’s desktop in Foggy’s handwriting— _gone to pick up food, back in half an hour_. It’s marked twenty minutes ago. There aren’t a lot of places around that Foggy can make to and from in half an hour that also don’t make Matt’s stomach do weird things ( _oh, super-senses, why must certain things be so hard, and edible food so expensive_ ) so it kind of narrows down where he could have gone, really. “I think he ordered Chinese. I’ll save some of it for you.”

“I shouldn’t be long.”

“Hey, I trust you,” she says. “Lemme know how it goes, whatever it is.”

“It’s not gonna be pleasant, but yeah. I’ll—when I get back.” He’s quiet again, for a second, long enough that she thinks he might have hung up. Then he says, “I just want to talk to Father Lantom about something.”

Her heart skips, not from fear but sudden, blazing relief. “He take confession this late?”

“Not like I keep regular hours.” He’s looser, now. Steadying out into solid ground. “We cheat the system a lot.”

“Tell him I said hi.”

“Sure,” he says. “I love you.”

“I love you too.” Darcy rests her lanyard on the top of Karen’s desk. “Call when you’re on your way again.”

“Yeah,” says Matt, and then he’s hung up. Darcy drops her bag on Karen’s desk too, and tosses her phone back into it, rubbing at her eyes underneath her glasses. It smells like someone’s been peeling oranges in here, which is something Karen does when she’s stressed, buy a shitton of oranges and pick at them with her fingernails, only eat half at a time and forget about the rest of the wedges. Well, oranges and Puerto Rican food, thanks to Minerva Jacinto’s last delivery. _Should have stopped at home and grabbed the suit._ It’d be easier to just go out for the night from here, change and go out over the rooftops, it’s not as if she hasn’t done it—

“Don’t jump,” Karen says, and Darcy shrieks. She actually upends a glass of water on the table, sends it flying, and the only reason the thing doesn’t shatter is because it’s made of plastic. Karen winces, barefoot and silent, a wraith in the dark, and says, “Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Jesus shit a fucking brick, Karen!” Rey sneaks out from the kitchenette, her head down, and pushes her big pit bull forehead into Darcy’s kneecaps, nearly knocking her off her feet. _For someone so fucking tiny you pack a fucking punch, dog, Jesus._ “I thought you were gone!”

“I had headphones in, I didn’t realize you’d come in—”

“ _Jesus_ ,” Darcy says again, and puts a hand to her heart. “Jesus—shit. Holy shit. I could have fucking tased you.”

“You didn’t.” Karen snags the paper towels out of the kitchenette, and drops a handful of them over the spill on the floor. “That’s why I stayed in the kitchen.”

“Jesus fucking fuck.” Her heart won’t stop racing, Jesus Christ. Darcy drops her hand to Rey’s ears, trying to hide the way her fingers are shaking. “Just—yakuza and assassins and Irish gangsters and holy shit, Karen, you scared me.”

“Sorry,” Karen says. She pats at the paper towels with the ball of her foot. “I have a headache, I thought turning out the lights would help. And I don’t like the door unlocked when I’m alone, so. Y’know. I thought Foggy would come back first.”

In the dark, she looks phantasmal, all pale hair and skin and will-o’-the-wisp eyes. There are caverns under her lashes, shadows painting hollows in her cheeks. She’s so suddenly, starkly skeletal that Darcy shuts up. “It’s fine,” she says, as Karen scoops up the wet towels and pads back into the kitchenette to throw them out. “You just—Jesus. You could be a cat burglar.”

“Sorry,” says Karen, a third time. “When I didn’t hear anything after you left with Elektra, I wasn’t sure you’d be coming back, tonight.”

And that’s pointed, if anything is. Darcy trails after her into the kitchen, and boosts herself up onto the counter beside the pile of orange peels and wedges Karen’s left on a plate. “Elektra wasn’t roping me into another hare-brained plot or anything, just—she was bored and wanted to take a look at the tenement, that’s all. Miles wouldn’t let her in, so I needed to supervise. No big deal.”

“She acted like it was a big deal.”

“Elektra’s—” She can’t find a word, not at first. “Uh.”

“Obnoxious,” says Karen. “Condescending.”

“Occasionally overdramatic,” says Darcy. “Also complicated. Very deeply. Not bad, necessarily, not really, just—complicated. What are you doing in here? I thought you were working in the conference room.”

“A unicorn came in. I had to vacate.”

“Unicorn?”

“A walk-in.” Karen folds herself down into a ball again, settles on the floor in her nest of papers. Rey curls up at Darcy’s feet, at the edge of the nest, resting her head on her paws and dusting her tail over the tiles. Karen’s spread out across the linoleum like she’s laying out graves. “You’d have to be a unicorn, if you haven’t heard all the shit Reyes has been saying about us the past few weeks. She left, and then I took Rey for a walk, and while I was gone Foggy went to pick up dinner, so I just—stayed in here. It’s quieter.”

“You want me to go?”

“You’re not loud,” Karen says, absently. “You’re noisy, but you’re not loud.”

“Have you met me? I’m both.”

“You know what I’m talking about, Darcy.”

“Still confused as to why my endless train of disasters isn’t exhausting for you, my poor introverted darling, but whatever, yes, I get it.” Darcy thieves an orange wedge off the plate. It’s too tart, and the juice leaves sticky smears over her fingertips. “If you have a headache you shouldn’t be looking at all that paperwork in the dark.”

“I took an aspirin.” She fidgets with a fluro pink post it, and shifts it to another pile. “What did she want?”

“What did who what?”

“The Wicked Witch of the West.”

That nickname’s gonna stick permanently, and she’s going to start calling Elektra _Elphaba_ to her face, and the skies will open and rain blood, holy shit. “I mean, she was bored. And she asked a bunch of questions, which I think is what she came for. She doesn’t understand how I work, I don’t think, and it’s pissing her off.”

“It’s not like you’re hard to understand.” And out come the claws, all the cactus prickles. Whatever Elektra said before Darcy arrived, it must have hooked deep enough to sting. “You’re a good person and you’re trying to help and you’re saving people’s lives every night instead of taking them, it’s really not that complicated.”

“It’s a little complicated, considering the whole ex situation.”

“Doesn’t mean she gets to come in and be a condescending asshole about the firm and about Foggy and about everything else, that’s—fuck.” She turns her hand, looks at her fingers. “Fuck.”

She’s bleeding. Paper-cut, probably. Darcy leans over, sneaks the band-aids they have stowed behind the coffee machine out, and offers her two. “Elektra is a study in extremes, and half of what she says is to get a reaction. Don’t take any of it personally, okay?”

“I take it personally when someone’s being an asshole. I’m kind of built that way.” Karen sucks the blood off her forefinger, glares at the cut. “Shit. A week of handling papers and that’s my first paper-cut and it has to be _these_ files, goddammit. I’m not even supposed to have these. Angie smuggled them to me in the last pile I picked up from her, said to be extra careful.”

“So we can send them back to Reyes with a bit of a _fuck you_ smeared on the side and blame an intern or something.” Darcy wipes the orange juice off her hand with a paper towel. “Are you okay? You’re kind of—sharp. Right now.”

“Fine,” Karen snaps. She fumbles the band-aid. “Shit.”

“Gimme your hand,” Darcy says, and holds hers out. She waits. Karen glares until she can’t hold it anymore, until the exhaustion hits her like a semi-truck. Then she sighs, very deep, and heaves herself to her feet again, offering her hand. The cuts are deeper than they looked down on the floor, the blood nearly black in the dim light. Darcy peels open a fresh band-aid, winds it around the first cut. “You sure you’re okay?”

“ _TrishTalk_ had a piece on Frank, today.” Karen keeps her hand absolutely still as Darcy opens a second band-aid, settles it in place. There’s a dark spot on the first already, blood leaking through. “Someone  called in with some—some awful bullshit, that’s all.”

“Did Trish read them the riot act or did you call in and do it for her?”

“Ah, no. I didn’t listen to all of it, I turned the cast off.” She flexes her fingers, makes a face. “Those are going to ache like a son of a bitch.”

“Probably.” Darcy crumples the wrappers up, and leaves them on the counter, stealing another bit of orange. “If you’re letting jackass ring-a-dings get you all bothered, you haven’t been sleeping enough.”

“I sleep.”

“Last night?”

Her mouth says _you are force-feeding me common sense and I don’t like it._ “You’re the one lecturing me on sleep right now?”

“This is our back and forth, isn’t it? You lecture me, I lecture you. It’s a system. Maybe someday one of us will actually take the good advice we’re getting from the other and chill the fuck out.”

Karen’s smile wavers, and fades. “Maybe.”

“Is it Foggy, or—”

“No, not Foggy, just—” She folds her arms up, curling them around her ribs, like she’s holding cracked pieces together. “I don’t know. Sometimes the hospital leaves me on edge. Like—I don’t know.”

“Oh.” She can’t not understand something like that, not when there are still half a dozen reporters hanging out in the main lobby that like to harass them every time one of them comes into the building. Claire’s started smuggling them in through employee-only entrances just to keep the patients from getting too disturbed. “Do you need a hug?”

Karen blinks at her, long and slow. Her lips part. “That,” she says, “or—or a lot of booze. Either way.”

“I think Foggy would actually become a mass murderer if we suggested a Josie’s run, but—I dunno. Jess would probably be down. We don’t have to tell him.”

She laughs. It sounds more like a hiccup. All at once, her eyes are too shiny, her nose turning red. “Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Hey.” Darcy slips off the counter. “Hey, you’re good, Karen, come on.”

Karen starts shaking when Darcy puts her arms around her, not crying, but taking deep, heaving breaths like she’s on the verge, her eyes hidden in the fabric of Darcy’s suit jacket. Her fingers are trembling, and she smells very strongly of oranges. Darcy hooks her fingers into Karen’s hair in an odd rhythm, not even sure where it’s coming from, three beats and then a pause. Like Elektra was doing with her bracelets, she realizes, after the third run-through. She doesn’t stop.

“It’s been a week,” Karen says into Darcy’s shoulder. “We haven’t found anything.”

“We’ve found loads of things we can use in court. There are just as many problems with that case as there are dots on the Is, we can get something done.”

“But there aren’t any _answers_ ,” Karen says. “That’s—I’ve looked at every page and I can’t find anything that might lead to an answer. I don’t know why there were so many people in the park that day, I don’t—I don’t know why they were in that part of the park, by the carousel, we don’t know—we don’t know why Reyes wants Frank dead, there’s nothing in his story that can prove something happened with the DA’s office, every time we turn a corner there’s another dead end—”

 _Relevant to everything always._ “We’re further than we were. There’s still time to find something before jury selection, and that’s going to take a while, the whole city’s mixed, finding unbiased jurors will take forever, you know that—”

“But if I don’t find anything, then—”

“—then you’d be a pod person, and not Karen Page, and we’d have to turn you out on your ear.”

Karen chokes a little. Her death-grip on Darcy’s shirt eases, just a bit. “I told myself I wouldn’t do this again. You have—you have more than enough shit, I don’t need to dump my crap on you.”

“Nah, I’m good. And I’m not just saying that, so don’t give me a face. I’ve been more worried watching you work yourself up into a fit than dealing with you needing hugs.” She sighs. “I’ve also kind of needed hugs, so this is me using you for my own benefit. Don’t think this is me being nice.”

Karen snorts. It’s wet and strangled, but it’s a little laugh, which means good things. Rainbows and sunshine and actual unicorns, not just walk-ins. “Are you and Matt okay?”

“Making stupid decisions.” _Like having sex instead of talking._ Not that either of them have ever been good at saying things, even though she drags it out a lot, forces the words out, because _God, if we don’t, how bad would it be right now?_ She has Jen to thank for that much common sense, at least. “And, y’know. Dealing with an ex out of nowhere. And people coming back who shouldn’t have. But me and Matt are okay, I think, for the most part. I’m more worried about the case, and about the yakuza, and about you, right now.”

“You don’t need to worry about me.” Karen sniffs, and draws back, covering her nose and mouth with one hand. Her cheeks are wet. “I’m just—I can’t sleep, and I’m worried, and I can’t stand not being able to find anything. It’s scrambling my brain, that’s all.”

“Yeah, well, we all happen to be fond of your brain, so maybe like—I don’t know. Even if I can’t go, you might want to call Jess and make a night of it. Get blasted. I can make an excuse to Foggy for you.” 

Karen shakes her head. She wipes at her eyes again. “No, it’s—I’m fine.”

 _Sure you are, Karen._ “If Foggy’s whole _I’m freaked out because Frank won’t talk to anyone but Karen or Darcy_ thing is bothering you, I can talk to him.” Again. Because _Foggy, seriously, you don’t have to worry about this_. She’s pretty sure he wouldn’t be so twitchy about it if his crush on Karen wasn’t still going haywire in the back of his head. “I don’t mind.”

“It’s not that, it’s just—” She bites her lip. “I don’t know. Him on top of—of call-ins to _TrishTalk_ on top of the look on Brett’s face when I go in there without you on top of—all of it, I guess.”

“What’s Brett’s face doing?”

“It doesn’t matter, don’t get snarly.”

“Hm,” says Darcy, and keeps petting at Karen’s hair. There are words bubbling just under the surface, turning the air to boiling water. “I mean, Foggy gets worried because it’s you. And Brett has his whole _I am a cop_ thing, too.”

“No, I know why, and I know—I know why people call in and say all that bullshit about how Frank is a monster and how he deserves to die and all the rest of it, I know _why_ , I just—that’s not—”

“Take a breath, Karen.”

Karen gives her a filthy look, but she breathes. “It’s like—he’s not doing this because he enjoys it. He didn’t start because he’s a psychopathic murderer, he didn’t—he went to war, and he came home, and his family _died_ , and all the people who are dead now, that was terrible, and cruel, but—but now at least they won’t get to do it to other people. Killing people is—it’s wrong, that’s not arguable, but I don’t—”

“You don’t think Frank is a monster,” Darcy says.

Karen gives her an odd look, then, sideways and small, halfway ended before it begins. “There are reasons that Frank is the way he is,” she says. “He’s not—he’s not evil, he doesn’t hurt people who don’t deserve it. He’s not like Fisk was, he’s not—not Wesley. His family died, and he—he sees it, every minute. You know that, you know what that feels like.”

“Yeah.” _Bang._ “I know.”

“He’s not insane,” she says. “He’s not evil, he’s not crazy. Not any more than you and Matt are crazy. And I don’t—Foggy doesn’t _get_ it, and I just—I’m sick of arguing about it with him. I’m sick of trying to justify why I give a damn.”

Her voice is quavering by the end of it, wobbling, an egg on the edge of a table, ready to shatter. On the floor, Rey lifts her head, her ears flopping. Her tail scuffs over the floor again. When the dog heaves herself to her feet to try and force her way into the middle of it, Karen starts laughing, and pulls away to settle with Rey more than halfway in her lap, making whiny puppy noises and being generally clingy as fuck. Darcy rests her hand to Karen’s head.

“No,” she says. “Frank’s not evil. He’s made terrible choices and there are some things that he’s done that I can’t—forgive, exactly. But he’s not evil. He’s not a bad man, not really. I don’t think.”

“Yeah.” Karen rocks sideways, and knocks her head into Darcy’s knee, leaving it there. “Now if only we could get the rest of the world to see that.”

“I doubt he’d want that, but we can try.” Darcy shifts her glasses. “Talk to Foggy. Tell him to quit. If he doesn’t, you can yell at him, or I can yell at him, or we can gang up on him and Matt will slink into the office and hide the way he always does when people yell about things in here, and then we can go back to looking at awful photographs of people missing hands and faces and, y’know. Spatter patterns.”

“He asked me today about Finn Brannigan, if—if anyone’s heard anything. I told him no.” Karen lifts her eyes. “Should I have told him otherwise?”

“You want to tell Frank anything about the guy he wants dead most in the whole world? Seems like a bad way to get him prepped for trial.”

“I can’t lie to him, though. He’s had enough of people lying to him.”

Something odd creeps up her throat, then, a taste like battery acid or iodine, lingering and tangy. “Karen, if Frank thinks there’s still someone out there who can give him answers about why his family died, then he’d break out of the hospital as soon as he could take a step without a crutch. You know that.”

“Yeah,” says Karen. “I know. But he’d know if I was lying. Besides, if we get answers this way, through the DA, then—then maybe we can keep him in check until you and Matt get Brannigan into custody.”

“If Elektra doesn’t keep dragging us out to hunt the yakuza.” Footsteps in the hall. “That’ll be Foggy. You good?”

“I’m good.” Karen rests her head back to Darcy’s knee. “Thank you.”

“Anytime, okay? If I was okay with you waking me up in the middle of the night to go walk by the water, I’m okay with you ranting at me about Foggy and Frank Castle.”

Another soggy little laugh from around Darcy’s kneecap. “It goes for you too, okay? If there’s anything—I mean. What with Elektra, and Kate, and you and Matt, and Jen, y’know, knowing about…stuff, and the yakuza coming back, if you need to—to talk. About anything. You can tell me, you know that. Right?”

“Yeah,” Darcy says, as Foggy opens the door. “I know.”

“Jesus, you guys.” Foggy heaves the bags through. “Why the fuck is it so dark in here? It’s like I’m walking into a planetarium.”  

“So we can eat you alive before you see our faces,” Darcy says, and goes to grab some of the Chinese food. She wants to confiscate some of the chicken before Karen gets up off the floor.  

.

.

.

 **The Urich Report (@theurichreport):** Castle Trial approaches, more questions unanswered: The Rise of the Punisher. #punisher #trialofthedecade tur.co/…

 **The Daily Bugle (@dailybugleny)** : Four car pile-up in Midtown Manhattan; Spider-Man Strikes Again! #webhead db.co/…

 **KHAAAAAAAAN (@kamala_k):** @dailybugleny Maybe leave Spider-Man alone, what’d he ever do to you, you vultures?

 **Rising Santino (@saintvasquez):** @kamala_k It’s open season rn thanks to the #punisher. All the heroes in this city are getting a bad rap.

 **Hawkeye, Not Hawkgal (@hisforhawtass):** @saintvasquez @kamala_k Do I count?

 **Rising Santino (@saintvasquez):** @hisforhawtass So long as you keep up the trend of not shooting anyone in the face.

 **Hero Finders (@maskwatchnyc):** Source claims three guys had the living crap kicked out of them last night in HK by a woman in a mask—not #lilith. Another #lamia attack?

 **Erinyes (@aeschylushaditwrong):** @maskwatchnyc Not even close.

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.

.

She sits and waits in the dark.

Elektra rocks her head against the cushion, and crosses her legs at the ankles. It’s the first time in nearly twelve hours that she’s sat down, the first moment in twelve full hours that she’s stopped long enough to let herself think. She’d needed the movement, first, energy to burn off. It’s still crackling in the back of her head, fire and smoke, catching at her senses, making her muscles jump, but now, at least, she can manage it instead of letting it manage her. _Control your emotions before they betray you_ , and movement is her answer. When she’s angry, she fights. When she’s confused, when she’s frustrated, she fights. She runs, she explores, she moves, constantly, and counts how many steps she takes until the swirl of her mind settles down and she can breathe through the roar again.

Lilith might have been putting her off by making her look at the Willie Lincoln files, but at least it had given her something to do after she’d left the tenement. She doesn’t kid herself into believing that she’s an expert on current Maggia politics, but when Fisk had first contacted the Hand, maybe ten years ago, now, Stick had made it a middling priority to keep an eye on the major players in regards to their relationship with Yoshioka Nobu. Don Rigoletto had been murdered last year, his neck snapped and his body dumped in the river, but there had been enough men left unscathed from the FBI’s purge of Fisk’s network that she’d been able to track down one or two after only a few hours of effort. Getting them to give her a name in regards to the Lincoln murder, though, that had been a bit more complicated.

_Especially with these ridiculous rules._

No killing, no sniping, no sex. Not that the last one’s too difficult. (She absolutely refuses to think about the party, how even though they’d done nothing, how even though she’d just sat there with her hands on his ribs and his breath on her throat, stiff and uncomfortable, she’d needed to run for hours afterwards, because _she will not think about it_ , not after all of this—) It’s sloppy and it’s dangerous to pick a fight with the Maggia and leave her targets alive to give a description (though really, _woman with dark clothes and a mask_ would make most people think _Lilith._ Or _Black Cat,_ but it’s not like she’s burgling any of them). She has no other choice, at the moment. Besides, it’s not as if she can’t handle anything the fractured remnants of the Rigoletto family can throw at her. Even the Manfredis are soon to be in their death throes, unless Silvia Manfredi manages to use Brannigan as a springboard into bigger and better things. Elektra’s been hearing whispers since she first came back to New York about Silvio Manfredi having a daughter, even if the woman’s notoriously reclusive. _And playing with fire, if the thing’s I’ve heard about Finn Brannigan are true._

Not that it’ll matter, particularly, if the Hand manage to have their way.

It had taken her precisely sixteen broken bones, three concussions, and one very useful stolen wrench to get the first name, a retired bruiser by the name of Tim Thompkins. Thompkins had broken within another hour, and given her another name, Marko. Add in another three or four broken bones, and Marko had given her a third name, a startlingly false name. _Caesar Cicero._ Alias Caesar Thompson, alias Cesare Michelin, alias Cicero Molina, alias, alias, alias. Not in the files, at least, none of the Willie Lincoln files, anyway, and when she Googles it, perched on a rooftop with her phone in one hand, there’s no trace there, either. “Rigoletto’s lawyer,” Marko had said through the blood, “his lawyer, people say he’s dead but he ain’t, went into hiding after Fisk took over, went to Europe for years, ‘til he knew he’d be safe again—”

“I don’t suppose you know if he’s back in New York?”

“The Man Mountain Marko—”

“The Man Mountain Marko,” Elektra had said, “will be telling me his life story by the time I’m finished, so why don’t we just cut to the chase.”

Lilith would have made it here eventually, she thinks, to this little apartment in East Harlem, but Lilith’s been distracted by other things, daylight things. (Lilith also might have taken longer to fall into the strategy of breaking a man’s teeth to get answers, but she would have done it eventually, Elektra’s sure.) No—Lilith would be here if not for all her distractions, and if Elektra can get an answer before the night ends, then it’s as good a tactic as any to get the woman to trust her. 

No, she doesn’t care if Lilith trusts her. She doesn’t _care_ , she knows she doesn’t, she doesn’t give a shit if Lilith trusts her or if she spends every second prepping for Elektra to slit her throat. ( _I trust you not to stab me in the back,_ she’d said, and how the hell is the woman so stupid, how has none of this blown up in their faces, trust never gets anyone anywhere, not when it comes to secrets, Elektra knows that better than anyone, she _knows_ that, and Lilith will learn if she isn’t figuring it out already. _None of them would ever say anything,_ she’d said, and she’d been so sure, so absolutely certain of it, _but t_ _here’s no way to know that for sure, you fool, you can’t see it but sometimes the people you think you can trust everything to turn around and—_ ) She doesn’t need Lilith to trust her, no, she doesn’t care, it would just—make things simpler, if she did. Matthew’s trust is lost, irrevocably, shattered into pieces too sharp to collect again, but if she has Lilith’s, even if it’s only a speck, it will smooth the way in the future. If Stick ever arrives. If the Hand ever makes a play. She’s drowning in ifs, and she can’t swim to shore.   

_You spent all that time thinking he was the only person who could understand you and you came back and he wasn’t right where you left him, anymore._

She twirls the knife between her fingers. Twelve hours later, it still stings, still jabs into her with the force of a dagger, still pops organs and shatters bone. _You wanted a better understanding of Lilith, and you came away blinking spots out of your eyes from the spotlight she turned on your own secrets._ She’d dug much too deep, much too fast, and Elektra’s reeling, she’s spitting, she’s spent twelve hours running from how it had made her feel, to be pinned to a corkboard and a scalpel slit her open, drag it all out from beneath her ribs to let foxes feast on her insides. Lilith should never have been able to get this deep under her skin.

 _I don’t hate you_ , she’d said. It won’t stop echoing. _I don’t hate you._

There’s a jingling of keys at the door. She reviews, in the moments before the click. She’d found the gun he’d had settled under the coffee table, removed the magazine and stowed the bullets away in one of her pockets, left it bald as an egg on the tabletop, useless. No other weapons she’d been able to find. Cicero’s been underground for a decade, it’s unlikely anyone would have contacted him to warn him of her coming. And besides: if he’s more than he seems, she could use a fight, right now.

 _You were never supposed to be able to see any of that,_ she thinks, as the door opens. _You were never supposed to be able to understand a single damn thing about me._

Elektra waits until he’s turned, until he’s snapped the deadbolt into place and dropped his briefcase on the floor beneath the table in the entryway, before she clears her throat. “You’re home late, tonight.”

“ _Fuck_.” He fumbles his keys, and they hit the wood with a clatter. Old, and out of shape, though there are places where muscles were, a definition that’s gone doughy and pale with age. “Jesus fuck, who the hell are you?”

“That depends very much on whether or not you decide to be friendly,” she says. The knife she’d stolen from the block in the kitchen rests cold on her leg as she angles it, letting the metal catch at the light with razor teeth. “I’d pick friendly, it’s easier.”

“Thought you and your boyfriend were too cowardly to use blades, Lilith.”

Everyone’s a critic, tonight. “I’m not Lilith.”

There’s a fedora on his head, and his hand doesn’t shake when he peels it away, hangs it on the hook. “That I’ll believe.”

“Cicero,” she says, “isn’t it? Caesar Cicero. How was your time in Sokovia? Before the disaster, obviously. After it would have been dreadful.”

“I don’t have time for games.” His eyes dart from the gun on the coffee table, to her crossed legs, to her mask, to the open window, to the gun again. “Get out or I’ll call—”

“The police?” _Please._ How did this man survive for so long as a Maggia attorney, with a face like that? “Tell me, darling, a man like you, with a record like yours, and all that heroin you’re keeping under your bed like a kid with a box of Girl Scout Cookies—yes, I found that, it wasn’t like it was difficult—you really think the police will be all that interested in what you have to say?”

He shuts his mouth up tight, and stares at her. Elektra bounces up out of the chair, stretching her arms high over her head. When he shifts his weight, wets his worm lips, she’s tempted to fling her stolen blade into his shoulder. “What the fuck do you want?”

“First off, to murder your stylist, because the only place a vinyl couch that shade of yellow could ever belong is in a bonfire.” She kicks the leg of the sofa as she passes. “Secondly, is Caesar Cicero your real name? Because honestly, that’s—that’s a little pathetic.”

“Get to the point before I break your damn neck.”

Elektra drops. He’s an old man, overweight, heavyset with bad balance and bad eyes, too, she thinks; he squints too much to have good vision. When she catches him in the ankles he hits the floor with a snapping sound, a hip or an knee or something else, she’s not sure, but she’s on him before he screams, her gloved fingers pressed tight over his mouth and the knife to his throat. From this close, yes, she can see the cataracts. Elektra shifts her weight, and a thin dribble of blood slips to the tip of the knife, spattering on the wooden floor.

“Friendly would have been easier,” she says, and doesn’t move. “Nasty’s more fun.”

“Jesus Christ, get off me, you bitch—”

Down, down, down on the blade, and he gurgles a little and shuts up. “Call me that again,” she says, “and I will tear out your tongue before I kill you. Very slowly. Blink once if you understand me.”

He blinks once, slowly. Elektra eases back.

“Fifteen years ago,” she says. “There was a murder. A man in Montana, in Lame Deer. A hired gun for Rigoletto. I want to know why he died.”

“Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Please.” Her mask is tickling, catching. Sweat trickles down the back of her neck. “You’ve covered your tracks, Caesar Cicero, you’re very good, but unfortunately for you, I’m better. It only took me six hours to find you once I was given your name. Mark Anthony as an alias, not really very secretive, don’t you think?”

“Yeah, fuck you,” he says. His breath stinks the way only a smoker’s can. “I don’t have anything to fucking say to you.”

She very nearly rolls her eyes. She doesn’t—she doesn’t want him getting ideas about getting up off the floor—but she wants to, enough that they actually sting in their sockets. “Right,” she says, and settles the tip of the knife against his breastbone. “We can start here if you want.”

“Jesus fucking—”

“The rules of polite conversation,” she says, “generally have an exchange. An answer for a question. I asked you a question. Don’t fuck with me, Mr. Cicero.  You won’t like the consequences.”

“I told you, I don’t know what you’re—”

He screams. She presses her hand close over his mouth before it gets too loud, drags the knife up out of his shoulder. There’s blood on the floor. “Wrong answer.”

“I don’t—”

“Didn’t I just tell you _not to fuck with me_?” The point of the knife pricks under his chin. “You did his books, you paid his men, you knew all the ins and outs of his organization so you could lie about them in court, you know who he would have hired to have a man murdered. Willie Lincoln, Mr. Cicero. Tell me who wanted Willie Lincoln dead. Tell me why.”

“ _I don’t fucking know_!” His ribs feel very fragile under her palm. Elektra jams the knife into the floorboards, watches him struggle not to blink. “Nobody told me he was dead until after it happened, I don’t know who killed him, it was no one I talked to, just—Jesus Christ, let me go—”

“Then the police were right, he worked for Rigoletto?”

“My shoulder—”

“I’ll give you a matching set if you don’t _answer me_.”

“Fucking—yes, yes, okay, yes, Lincoln worked for Rigoletto, worked for him for years, Rigoletto tracked him down with some mutant he had on his payroll, gave him a job, introduced him to his fucking wife, just— _Jesus_ —”

“Why track him down, why care?”

“Because Willie Lincoln was a fucking mutant too, okay? Fucking—shit, would you _get off me_?”

“Why?” Elektra says, and resettles the knife up under his chin. “I’m not making you uncomfortable, am I, Mr. Cicero?”

“Shit.” When he swallows, his Adam’s apple bobs against the blade. “Lincoln was a mutant, he could—he could turn into whoever he wanted, made him real fuckin’ good at his job. Worked out a deal with Rigoletto where he could go back to fuckin’ Montana anytime, he was Rigoletto’s favorite killer, nobody expected him to get murdered—”

“It wasn’t one of Rigoletto’s men?”

“Nobody was ever fuckin’ stupid enough to say anything if it was!”  

“But people had theories, didn’t they? People always have theories. You Maggia men, you’re gossips, you can’t help yourselves, you get together in your bars and you take bets about who kills who—”

“Not with this we didn’t.” He spits between his teeth when she ghosts the blade over the carotid. His pulse is beating in his throat like a piston in an overworked engine. _If he has a heart attack,_ she thinks, _will they still be cross with me?_ “Rigoletto was fuckin’ pissed as hell, nobody said anything, nobody wanted anyone suspicious of them, we all kept our mouths shut—”

“You’re not a stupid man, Mr. Cicero,” she says. She looks at the knife, at the blood on his shoulder, at his eyes. “Well, not overtly. You had some idea, even if you never said a word. You’d best tell me before I start getting creative.”

“I didn’t—”

“Oops,” she says, and sinks the blade in again, in the meat just above his fragile, worn-thin clavicle. She leaves it there. “Last chance. I wouldn’t waste it, if I were you.”

He’s cursing under his breath, or praying, a string of _fuck, fuck, Christ, Jesus, fuck_ , and she’s tempted to slap him out of it. There’s blood on the floor, now, spreading out from his shoulders like sloppy, ruined wings, pools of deep dark red. “Nobody knew for sure, nobody could prove it, but people thought—shit.”

“Thought what?”

“Man who worked for Rigoletto as a killer,” says Cicero. “Picked up all his jobs once Lincoln died. But he had an alibi, nobody could ever prove it was him—”

“This man, what’s his name?”

“He’s dead now, it doesn’t matter—”

She bares her teeth, and twists the knife. “ _It_ _matters to me._ ”

“ _Fucking Christ_!” He’s crying, tears slicking back over his temples to catch in his ears along with the blood. “Larks, Larks, his name was Larks, he died seven years ago in a car accident, Daniel Larkspur, you can look it up, just _get off me, for Christ’s sake_ —”

“Why did Larks want him dead?”

“Nobody knew, we all assumed it was just a job—”

“A job from who?”

“I don’t _know_!” 

Elektra drags it free, the blade. Blood sprays back over her cheeks, over her mask. When she knocks him in the temple with the butt of the knife, Cicero goes abruptly silent. His eyes fall closed, his piston heart keeps pumping in his throat, and the blood slowly spreads, burbles up from inside and slicks down his shoulders onto her gloved hands. Elektra swings her leg off him, stands and throws the knife, point first, into the floor. It shudders and sticks there, trembling.

“I still want to murder your stylist,” she tells him, and goes to grab a towel from the kitchen. If he bleeds out, then she’ll have to explain it, and she’d rather not deal with the fallout. “And whoever told you that fedoras were back in ought to have their kneecaps perforated.”

Of course, Caesar Cicero says nothing. A sad old man, she thinks, in a sad old system too caught up in its own torpidity to realize how much trouble it’s in. Adding in Fisk’s conviction, and the capture of so many of his men in so many different syndicates, well. It makes certain things easier for her, but in many ways, it’s just a little pathetic.  She folds up the dishtowel, settles it over his shoulder and presses down with one hand. Her gloves will muffle the shape and size just a little, but by the time this towel’s soaked through, there won’t be a handprint left for her to worry about, really. It’s only once she’s crouched there looking at him for a minute or two that she finally pulls her phone out from her back pocket, tugs off her glove so she can swype out a text.

_I need a favor._

Stick responds within seconds. _About what?_

 _Background checks._ She types in the name, Daniel Larkspur, adds in affiliation. _Whatever you have._

_What’s this for?_

_Me,_ she writes, and waits. It’s a full minute before he responds again.

_You owe me for this, Ellie._

“Yeah.” She dials a number. “I figured.”

“Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?”

“Hello,” Elektra says. “I’d like to report a home invasion.”

.

.

.

The next morning they walk to work separately. It’s not really what happens, normally, but Matt has an early meeting with one of the cops who worked the scene in Central Park, so he’s dressed and halfway to the door before Darcy’s even all the way out of bed. “I don’t know how long it’s going to take,” he says, and settles on the edge of the mattress to finish the knot on his tie. Darcy heaves herself up off the pillows, loops her arms around her knees to watch him do it. “I should be back to the firm by noon, but I can’t be sure.”

“I think Foggy’s gonna have a heart attack if you’re not, but I can defibrillate, it’s okay. Or call Claire in, she’d probably come.”

“Hah.” He pulls the tie through, settles the knot. “You okay?”

“With you going to meet with that cop? As long as you don’t hold up a sign that says _Arrest me, I’m Daredevil_ I don’t see how there’d be a problem with it.”

“No, uh.” Matt wets his lips. “You had more nightmares again last night.”

 _That’s heartening news._ Darcy props her chin up in one hand, watching him. “I don’t remember them, if I did. I didn’t punch you again, did I?”

“No, you didn’t punch me.” He shakes his head. “And when you did it the first time I was more proud than anything, honestly. It was a good punch.”

“You’re such a weirdo,” she says, and reaches out to tweak the tie. “I don’t remember them, don’t worry. And, y’know. It works like this sometimes. I get bad ones for a week or two and then they go away. It’ll get easier once the whole thing with the yakuza is done.”

Matt’s lips twist, but he nods. Darcy rakes her hair back up out of her face, making a weird little noise when her nails catch in a tangle, and draws her knees up against her chest again. “I’m just—worried,” he says, after a minute. “About you.”

“You don’t have to be.” She rubs at the tattoo of chains on her wrist, absently. “I’m fine. Or I will be, once things get easier. If they get easier.”

“They will,” says Matt, steady as anything. “They have to.”

Darcy blinks at him a few times. “That’s a change of tune.”

“Little bit.” He leans back, hands to the bedspread, lifting his face to the ceiling. His hair falls back in a mess away from his face. “I’ve been thinking. Lately.”

“You’ve actually had time to think on top of everything?”

“I keep telling you meditation helps.”

“Whatever, goobercat.”

His mouth quirks up, flickering back down. Half a smile, here and then gone. “I wasn’t going to go to St. Patrick’s, yesterday, not at first. But—I don’t know. What you said last week, after the party, about—about both of us being scared, it made me think. I guess some of it is finally starting to stick. That neither of us are really alone with all of this, it’s—some part of me is finally trying to believe it, a little bit. Not that I didn’t know it before, but—but everything that’s happened lately has made me look at it more closely, that’s all.”

“Oh,” she says. There’s nothing else she can say.

“Then Karen said something, about Frank, but that…doesn’t matter so much, really, it just made me think, and it’s—I decided it was easier to deal with a browbeating from Father Lantom than start losing everything I care about.”

The clock’s suddenly very fascinating. Seven minutes after seven, look at that. Time does work.

“We can do this,” Matt says. He sketches his thumb over the back of her hand, waits until she turns it palm up to weave her fingers together with his. “The pair of us. We can deal with this. I’m used to doing everything on my own, it’s—I’ve always done that. And I think you have too, but just—if we do this together, then we can do this. All of us, the whole firm, but—but especially you and me. We can beat this, if we do it together.”

“Am I dating Matt Murdock or Steve Rogers?” she says, finally, because her voice is all wet and sloppy and she’s not going to cry at seven in the fucking morning when she’s only had four hours sleep, that’s stupid and she won’t do it. Matt laughs, sudden and cracking, and cups a hand to the back of her head to press a kiss to her hairline. 

“I’m not blonde enough for that.”

“Blonde all-American beefcake, Star-Spangled Man,” she says, and catches his hand when he traces his finger over her cheek. “What the hell did Father P say to you to get you talking like this? Not that it isn’t, y’know, lovely and everything, just—what did he say?”

The smile on his mouth is closer to mischief than she’s seen in ages, Peter Pannish, full of secrets. “Sanctity of the confessional.”

“Fine, keep your secrets, jerk.” She kisses his palm. “Whatever it was, I’m—I don’t know. I’m happy. That he said it.”

“I am, too,” Matt says. “Happy. It’s been terrible for so long that I didn’t remember, really. And with what we’re doing, and—and what the firm is doing, and all of it, I couldn’t focus on it, but I am. I’m happy with you.”

 _Emotional whiplash ahoy, Batman._ “Now I really want to know what Father P said, holy shit.”

“The truth,” Matt says. “He told me the truth. Like he’s always done and you’ve always done and the rest of them have always done. I just—wasn’t listening, before.”

“And why are you listening now?”

He shrugs. “I’ve had enough hearing problems lately. I don’t need to make more for myself.”

It’s a deflection, but she can chase it later. She’s _happy_ , actually, genuinely, no-strings-attached happy for the first time in what feels like forever, and when Matt rocks forward and sets a kiss to her mouth she strokes her thumb over the line of his cheek and smiles. She can’t not. “I told you to tell me if your head was doing stupid things, still. We can probably get it X-rayed now without people being suspicious as fuck.”

“I’m fine.” Matt heaves himself up off the bed, bends and kisses her again. “I’m also gonna be late.”

“You think that cop would mind if you called and rescheduled?”

“Probably.” He tips her chin up, settles another kiss to the corner of her lips. “I have to go.”

“Are you sure?” Darcy says, half-muffled into his mouth. “Really sure?”

“Really sure.”

“Absolutely sure?”

“Keep your hands to yourself,” he says, but he’s laughing.

Darcy hums, cups her hands around the back of his neck and kisses him, lingering, catching at his lip, a taste more than anything. Matt makes a noise deep in his chest, more purring than human, and drops back to the bed to knit his hand into her hair, and yes, hi, she loves this. Toothpaste and coffee and warmth and Matt, and the scrape of aftershave and skin, and Darcy scratches her nails into his scalp and presses her nose into the bone of his jaw.

“ _Absolutely_ sure? _”_

A little noise snags in his throat. “I was,” he says, and settles his thumb into the space behind her ear. “Starting to weigh pros and cons.”

Darcy puts her mouth to his lips, chin. “Come on, Matt,” she says, and he jolts when she cuts her nails into the back of his neck. “You’re going to be late.”

“Says the one making me late.” Matt kisses her, curving. “Let go.”

“If I have to.” She leans back and fists her hands up in the blankets. “I’ll keep Hurricane Nelson under control until you get back.”

“Hurricane Page might be more of a problem today, considering the newest shipment of files, but whatever.” He stands, and rests his mouth to her hair for a moment. “I love you.”

“This is actually the most amazing morning ever, holy shit.” She noses at his cheek. “I love you.”

She’s still smiling when he shuts the front door, locking it behind him. There’s still an half-an-hour before she actually has to get up and do anything, which means when she curls up on the pillows again, she’s justified in tugging her phone off the charge cord and actually looking at Ben’s news blog for more than three minutes at a time.

The mood pops within an hour of getting to Metro-General. The fourth time, she thinks—fourth time in a week she’s been here, fifth time for Karen (or more, judging by the visitor’s log that Brigid offers them)—and they’re going over the same thing, over and over again, trying to seize any thread, snag any clue. _It would be easier,_ she thinks, _if Frank would talk to more people than to Karen and me,_ but that’s either a million years in the future or out of the picture entirely. It would also be easier if he quit trying to sneak in questions about what happened to her hand, because for fuck’s sake, like that has any relevance to whether or not he’s going to supermax, or being thrown in to Ryker’s genpop. Really, it shouldn’t be this fucking complicated to get a full story out of him.

_Who am I kidding. It’s Frank. Of course it’s fucking complicated._

“Christ, my head hurts.” Darcy shoves her pen behind her ear, takes off her glasses to rub at her eyes. “Okay. From the top. You were all in the park. You’d brought a blanket—”

“Which has vanished,” Karen says. “Along with all other physical evidence you were there.”

“It was blue,” says Frank. “Used to keep it on the back of the couch. Spur-of-the-moment thing, using that blanket. Usually we had a different one to leave on grass, but it needed washing anyway. Maria’d already spilled coffee on it that week, didn’t think grass would do it any harm.”

“Okay.” All likelihood is that the blanket and all the rest of the evidence Frank’s described—evidence that his family ever existed, evidence that they were murdered in the park, evidence that they went there at all, that day—has already been destroyed. Reyes isn’t nearly so sloppy as to not cover her tracks with things like bloodstained blankets. ( _Blood, and brains, and tears, and bone._ ) “You’d brought a blanket, a cooler. Most of you were on the blanket. Maria—” she touches a circle on the lower right hand corner of the square, sketched out on the little whiteboard she’d brought with her. “—and Frank Jr., next to her, and you were here.”

Another circle, just beyond the circumference of the blanket. He’d been standing, he’d said. Standing and talking to Maria and keeping half an eye on Lisa from far away. At least until he’d heard her scream.

“Yeah.” Frank doesn’t lift his eyes from the whiteboard she’s settled on his knees. He’d be in custody by now, she thinks, if she hadn’t smashed his knee so badly with both his shotgun and her baton. She stands by the first blow, and by the second, but she still feels bad when she notices the cast underneath the thin blanket. In a way, it’s better, just because Frank Castle getting put into official custody when he’s already had two cops try to kill him seems like a bad idea. And Brett’s here basically all day, every day. She trusts Brett, at least, and Brigid. Neither of them will take Frank out of the cuffs, but she hadn’t been stupid enough to ask, anyway. “Sounds about right.”

“Who was around you?”

“Wasn’t payin’ attention until it was too late.” He’s clipped, cold. “Told you that, Cat.”

“I know, but anyone you remember might be able to help.”

Karen points with one long finger to a red dot about a handspan away. Red dots for civilians, she remembers. Black for Frank and his family. “What about the woman on the cell phone?”

“Dunno where she went. Must’ve run when the shooting started.”

“Same with the homeless man near the carousel,” says Darcy, and touches another red dot. “Neither of them ever came forward.”

“Or they were paid to go far away,” Karen says, only half under her breath. “Wouldn’t put it past Reyes to do that much.”

“Not really, no.” And any surveillance footage from that day is going to be a royal pain to get their hands on. She’s been trying to talk to Moustakas to get a warrant for a week, but no dice. _Even Moustakas._ “What about the other people around you, what were they doing?” 

“Some families. Don’t remember how many.” Frank shifts his knees under the blanket, and grits his teeth. “They ran when the shooting started. Then a few look-outs. Irish, I think, most of ‘em. Men and women, equal mix. Would’ve been suspicious otherwise.”

The Brannigans and the O’Shaughnesseys, all green dots. “What about Los Milagros?”

“They came in later.” And those are the purple dots, the ones with arrows for direction, for location, for shifting movement. There are a great many of dots clustering up about twenty feet away from the Castles’  blanket, for their deal. A riot of color and violence. “Los Milagros next. And then the Dogs of Hell.” Yellow, for the dogs. “And the first shot was fired by—”

“Trajectory-wise?” Frank touches one green dot, towards the outer left. “This one.”

“Not the guy next to him?”

“Lisa, she, uh. She moved.” He traces the sketched arrow, and draws his hand away. “She saw the gun, screamed. First shot caught her right in the mouth.”

“Which is completely against what the coroner’s report claims.” Christ. Right in the mouth, through the back of the head. For Frank, he’s being delicate about it.   _Pulp_ , he’d said, back in the graveyard. A mess of red where her face should have been. _Jesus fucked a post._ Her head hurts, her heart hurts, her mouth hurts, her arm—though her arm still kind of aches sometimes when she twists it the wrong way, thanks to very sharp knives, so that at least isn’t Frank’s fault. Or the fault of the DA’s office. Or of fluorescent lighting. “You realize how difficult it’s gonna be to prove any of this.”

“It’s the truth,” says Frank.

“Yeah, and you know that and I know that, Karen and Foggy and Matt know that—” _and Jen,_ she thinks, _Jen and Reyes and Tower, too, probably, and whoever in the gangs is still alive to remember_ “—but Frank, you were shot in the head. Prosecution’s gonna be all over that. Even though you woke up, and even though you’re sane, they’re going to take one look at you and that dip you have above your ear where the bullet went in and they’re gonna claim you’re misremembering the whole thing, due to significant trauma to your little grey cells.” Darcy rubs at her eyes again, and leans back in her chair. Next to her, Karen recrosses her legs at the knee, tucking her feet beneath the cold metal of the folding chair and reaching out to squeeze Darcy’s elbow, just once. “Any defense attorney in the system would be able to read that much. And if they _do_ put you on the stand—which’d be a stupid move, by anyone’s standpoint—then they’d pick and pick and pick at it until you lost your temper and that’d just fuck us all right up shit creek.”

“Temper,” says Frank, and grumbles a laugh. “Me? I’m a pussycat.”

“More like a rabid bear,” Darcy says under her breath, and Frank grumbles again, just a little. Karen draws her hand away from Darcy’s elbow. “How’s your knee?”

“Shit.” He fists his hand around the hem of the blanket. “How’s your arm?”

“Noticed that, huh?” She’s been sure to wear long sleeves into the hospital room, but she’s flinched a couple times, she’s pretty sure. “Better than it could be. Don’t get snarly, Francis.”

“Christ, don’t call me Francis.”

“Then don’t get snarly.”

He tips his head. “Happened to your face, too, whatever it was.”

“Whatever, man.” She looks at Karen. “Karen, you have a question face.”

“I don’t,” Karen says, and bites her lip. “Have a question face.”

“That is most definitely a question face.” Darcy takes the whiteboard away from Frank—if Brett or Brigid poke their nose in to give them a ten minute warning and realize they’ve been giving him shit to hold, Brett will probably spit venom like that dinosaur in _Jurassic Park_ —and rests it on her knees, snapping a photo with her cell phone. Which she may have smuggled in. Shoved in her bra. Between her boobs. Nobody touches there, it works. “What’s the question?”

Karen darts a look at Frank. “You say that you were on your knees,” she says, “here,” and touches a spot marked with a purple X. Where Frank had fallen, or near enough, according to whatever piecemeal bits of evidence they’ve scrounged out of the official police report. “Your wife died on the blanket, same with your son. Lisa died here.” Right beside the purple X. “The other bodies were all uniformly gang members, and they were scattered like this, on three of the four sides, basically boxing you in. The carousel was on the fourth side.”

 _Like rats in a trap._ She keeps that between her teeth.

“That’s correct, ma’am.”

“Which of them did you see die?” says Karen, and Frank’s jaw gets tight again. “Not your family, but the others. You said you killed two of them before they  managed to get you on the ground, and that’s self-defense, undeniably, but—which ones did you see die?”

“Why’s that matter?”

“Perspective.” Karen takes the whiteboard from Darcy. “You were shot before the firefight was over, but if we can work out who shot whom and when it happened, then—I don’t know. Maybe that’ll give us something.”

Frank’s quiet, watching her. Not Darcy, but Karen. He barely even blinks. “Like what?”

“You killed most of the men who survived,” Karen says. “Maybe not all of them.”

“Like any of ‘em will agree to get on the stand.”

“No, but we might be able to get information from them if they’re still alive. And if we get more information, maybe we can get more evidence to—I don’t know. Prove you weren’t motivated by some kind of sociopathic disorder.”

 _Which’ll probably end up being my job. And Matt’s._ “It’s not a bad notion, Frank.”

“Brannigan’s still alive. Track him down first.” He blinks, slowly, and for a second when he turns his head and looks away she thinks of old paintings, of Renaissance art of Biblical heroes holding bloody severed heads. “Give me twenty minutes with him, he’ll give you whatever you need on paper before he dies.”

“Maybe don’t say shit like that outside of this room, yeah?” Darcy glances at Karen, back at Frank. He’s pressed his mouth closed, lips thinning out. For some stupid reason, all she can think is: _Kitten Thinks Of Nothing But Murder All Day._ Maybe replace that with _Puppy._ Or _Grizzly Bear._ “There’s a questionable list of the people who were killed in the park that day, but there were half a dozen men or more who walked off with wounds that never showed up in local hospitals. If we can mark out where they all fell and who fell first and the rest of it we can find who escaped. Probably.”

Frank’s eyes are marbles, dark and blank and hard as stone. “Maybe.”

 _Oh, for God’s sake._ “Just to be clear,” Darcy says, and points. “Karen Page, badass.” And again: “Frank Castle, Punisher.” And again, one last time. “Darcy Lewis, Lilith.”

“ _Darcy_ ,” says Karen in a hiss, and looks over her shoulder as if she expects to find Reyes in the door frame. “What the _fuck_ —”

“He doesn’t want to blow my cover, but there’s no cover to be blown. And don’t start, Frank,” she says, when Frank’s mouth twists into an empty snarl. “We can have the conversation about how I’m weak for trusting people _after_ we figure out what the hell happened that day, all right? Also, preferably, after we keep you out of genpop so you don’t get shanked. I’ve been clipped with shivs, they’re deeply unpleasant and usually laden with tetanus.”

Karen wrinkles her nose. “How are you not dead?”

“Ask the Commissioner.”

“I thought it was switched out to Leslie Thompkins.”

“Fine, Commissioner Thompkins,” says Darcy. Claire is honestly the only reason neither she nor Matt have succumbed to sepsis in the past year. She crosses her arms, and doesn’t stop staring. “We’re here to figure out the truth, Frank. Can’t do that without telling it, at least a little bit.”

He’s quiet for a beat, for three. Then he sighs, rubs at the split to his nose. “Shit, Cat.”

“I think the detective out there is starting to get freaked out that you call me that. Brett doesn’t know what to make of a lawyer and a murderer being on good terms, _Jarhead_.”

“You’re batshit,” says Frank, and focuses on Karen. Karen clears her throat, curls her hands tight around the edges of the tiny whiteboard. “She always been this batshit?”

“C’mon, Frank, like you’re not.”

“She’s been worse lately,” Karen says. “Shit’s been going down outside that you haven’t heard about.”

“Shit like what?”

“Shit like yakuza,” says Karen, and keens when Darcy trods on her foot.

Frank flicks a _what are you, stupid?_ look Darcy’s way. “You doin’ that alone?”

“You,” Darcy says, very sternly, “are strapped to a hospital bed, and you’re gonna be on trial for like a million counts of murder in a few weeks, so don’t you fucking start. And _you_ —” She glares at Karen. “You have slept less than me over the past few weeks trying to get answers in this, Karen, so don’t be a hypocrite about this one.”

“Yeah, but I don’t carry around a baton and beat the shit out of people at two in the morning on top of everything else.”

 _No, just a .380._ “Don’t gang up on me. It’s not fair.”

“Life ain’t fair, Cat,” says Frank, and steals another look at Karen. “Know Red, too, don’t you? Red and Cat, who they are, all of it?”

Karen puts her shoulders back, sits up straight. “Yeah.”

“Never said a word to anyone?”

“Watch it, Jarhead.”

“No, it’s okay.” Matt, she thinks, bares his teeth when he’s making a point. Foggy over-enunciates his words. Darcy drawls. Karen just…stares. “Darcy and—Red, they’re family. Almost the only family I have. Red saved my life, and Darcy—” She stops, and swallows. “I’ve never told anyone. I’m never going to. I won’t be the one to put them in danger. I _won’t._ ”

She can’t hear anything over the echo of her own heartbeat. Darcy doesn’t move. She wants to, desperately— _Karen, oh my god, break my heart all at once, why don’t you—_ but she doesn’t move, because they’re frozen, all of them. The air almost seems to crack when Frank finally turns to stare at the wall, scoff in the back of his throat.

“Doesn’t always work like that, ma’am. Don’t always get the chance.”

“I can keep my mouth shut,” Karen says. “I’m really damn good at keeping my mouth shut to keep people I care about safe. But I’m not here to protect her, I’m here because I want to know the truth, same as you, Frank. Same as all of us.”

Frank’s black ice, Darcy thinks, but he’s also gasoline. There’s an odd acid slant to the look he snaps Karen with, then, like the room could catch on fire if someone just flicked a match. Karen doesn’t blink, or twitch. She looks, and Frank looks, and Darcy just watches, until it feels like the world’s narrowed down to this, a hospital room and a silent question-and-answer game, a sudden, sparking sense of recognition. Monster to monster to monster. The whole hospital might go up in flames.

“Dunno who dropped first,” Frank says. He still hasn’t blinked. “First one I remember seeing fall was by the carousel. Sawed-off to the face. Think he was Los Milagros.”

“Okay.” Karen leaves her chair, puts the whiteboard back on Frank’s knees. When she tucks her hair behind her ear, the rest of it falls in a cascade over her opposite shoulder, tickling at the blanket. “Who was next?”

Darcy has to olly out about twenty minutes after that. Karen doesn’t. “I’ll get the timeline down as best I can,” she says, not looking back at Frank; “I’ll call you when I’m done,” and Darcy wonders how much Foggy would be screaming at the sight of Karen resettling in her chair and hooking her hair behind her ears again to keep working, at the fact that Frank still calls Karen _ma’am_ and probably isn’t gonna stop anytime soon. He wouldn’t go into hysterics, she doesn’t think, but he still gets weird and pinched and uncomfortable when Karen talks about any of it. She’d stay—she kind of wants to stay—but she has to get down to Battery Park and talk to Melvin. The whip, apparently, is finally ready for business.

She may have possibly gone into a BDSM shop and bought a whip to practice with in Fogwell’s, in the few hours she’s managed to snatch between commissioning the thing and now. (Collectively? Maybe four hours. At the most. But she’s at least guaranteed to hit a post, even if she can’t snap a water bottle off the top of it. _I need a Time-Turner._ Or the ability to turn into the Energizer Bunny on command.) At least this time the subway isn’t crammed into a soupy, marshy mess of sweat and humidity and bad air conditioning. It’s more of a relief than she wants to admit.

Melvin’s not awake when she bangs on the door. He’s still struggling to pull on a shirt when he opens it up, blinking at her, bleary and blinking and making a face at the September sunlight. “Sorry,” he says. “Took too long. Much longer than I said. Didn’t fit right.”

“I told you we could scrap it if it was too complicated.”

“I could do it.” He finally wrenches the T-shirt over his head and shoulders, tugs at it until it settles. “Then you needed new gloves. Thicker ones. So you don’t get zapped. Come on. It’s downstairs.”

“Where’s Betsy?”

“Work. Double-shift. This way.”

The whip is lying coiled on the table. _Kate’s never gonna quit with the Catwoman jokes now, I swear to god._ Six feet long—or no, just beyond that, six feet and six inches—with a hard knob at the end like a sap a cop might carry, and no buttons. “Electric pulse is pressure-triggered,” Melvin says, and pulls on a glove before picking the thing up, letting it unfurl through the air. It slaps at the ground like a dead fish. “Squeeze twice to turn it on, squeeze twice again to turn it back off. Has to charge between every ten uses. Voltage is—higher than regular tasers. Not deadly, but high. ”

“Thus the gloves?”

“Rest of your suit’s already insulated, shouldn’t be much of a problem if it touches you anywhere else. Gloves were thinner, though. Wanted you to be able to find buttons on things without taking ‘em off. Doesn’t work like that anymore.” He lifts his hand and squeezes, deliberately, in a pulse like a heartbeat. There’s a sudden crackling. Sparks peel off the weave of the whip, leave sooty stars  on the concrete floor. Melvin pulses it again, and it snaps off. “My advice? Keep the spark off until you have it wrapped around someone’s neck. Safer that way.”

The new gloves are on the table. Darcy takes a ring off her middle finger (something Jen had given her ages ago, a thin silver band carved with stars) and tugs them on. They’re thicker, definitely, than the one’s she’s using already; they’re not as worn, don’t smell like blood. They’re just as supple, though, somehow. “How’d you get them like this without beating the crap out of someone in them?”

“Different materials.”

This whip is longer than the one she’s been practicing with. The weight’s different. Not quite a snake-whip, not with the weight in the base. She squeezes the handle twice, and the hair on the back of her neck stands up when it starts sparking. Darcy turns it back off again, and flicks it a few times, experimentally. Melvin watches, perched on his toes, swaying back and forth like he’s going to fall to the ground in a heap. When she snaps it out, she actually manages to wrap the end around the leg of a stool, yanking it off the ground without much trouble. She doesn’t pulse it, but she _could_ , and that’s enough. “And I charge it—”

“Here.” Melvin gestures to the table, to what looks like a tiny Hot Wheels racetrack setup, high edges and a bowl with a charge cord attached to the base. “Plug in the cradle, curl the whip up, leave it. Should only take an hour to get full charge back up.”

“Where’d you get this?”

“C’mon,” says Melvin, with a surprisingly wicked little smile. “It’s me.”

“True.” Darcy coils the whip back up, and snaps it out again. It’s unwieldy, in some ways—she’s not used to it, she’ll need to stay at a distance, make sure no one gets in close enough to render it impossible to use, but…goddamn. _Kind of want to watch_ Raiders of the Lost Arc _, now._ “I’m sorry it was so complicated.”

“Had to figure out how to layer the braid with the wiring to make sure it was uniform.” Melvin perches on a stool, watches as she snaps the whip out again, and again. Her arm’s gonna hurt like a motherfucker, but at least now she can practice properly. “Face. Your arm. Knife?”

“Yakuza aren’t friendly.” Darcy shakes the whip free of a mannequin. Practicing in a room full of sensitive equipment is…probably a bad idea, now that she thinks about it. Still, it looks like Melvin’s cleared a space just for this, so. She cracks the whip again, and leaves a dent in the mannequin’s shoulder. “Thank you, Melvin.”

“’s no problem.” Melvin rocks from foot to foot. “Told you. Lilith’s not a baton. Or a knife. Doesn’t—doesn’t fit right. Lilith’s sparks. Mike’s sticks and balance and fists, y’know. Lilith’s electric shocks and—and lipstick and shadow.”

That might actually be the most poetic thing anyone’s ever said about her. Darcy blinks at him, slowly. “I—thank you, Melvin.”

Melvin scoots away. There’s a second mannequin, a woman’s, layered in half-finished armor and dark fabric. He fiddles with one of the pinned seams. “Where’s Mike?”

“At work.”

“How’s his head?”

“Thick as ever. Who’s the costume for?”

“Betsy,” says Melvin, and adjusts a pin. “Sort of. Wanted to make sure she was safe. She’s, uh. Had a job offer. Women’s shelter.”

Oh. “I thought she was working at that urgent care.”

“They said, um.” He shifts. “Said people were complaining about her. ‘cause of her hijab. Said they weren’t gonna fire her, but. Might not be safe there anymore. So she was looking.”

“If there’s been discrimination—”

“She doesn’t want to do anything.”

Shit. “A women’s shelter, now? Which one?”

“Barclay’s,” Melvin says. “Looked online. Someone—lady was stabbed there. Few months ago. By her ex. Wanted to make sure it won’t happen to Betsy.”

“Oh.” Darcy winds the whip up. “Makes sense.”

Melvin pushes at the mannequin. “People’re yelling,” he says. “At her. On subways and things. Other people stick up for her, but—I want to make sure she’s safe.”

She focuses on peeling the gloves back off, just so she doesn’t see the look on his face. “You told her that yet?”

“Yeah.” Melvin lifts one massive shoulder. “She says she’s fine.”

“But you’re worried.”

“She’s scared,” he says, simply. “Lots of people are scared. Punisher. People dying. Regular crime, y’know. Can’t be everywhere, Lilith. Not you or Mike.”

If there’s anything she’s learned the past few weeks, it’s how fucking true that is. Darcy has to clear her throat a few times before she can speak. “So you’re making body armor?”

“’m good at it.” He rocks again. “Good at weapons, but—dunno. Want to be done with them. Not my life anymore. Good at armor. I like keeping people safe.”

 _And all we keep asking you for is weapons._ “Sorry.”

“No. Don’t be sorry. You help. You and Mike, you promised, you’d keep me and Betsy safe. Kept your promise. Fisk is gone. You help.”

The emotional overload, right now, is actually kind of insane. Darcy blinks until her vision clears, fixes her glasses on her nose. “Doesn’t feel like it much, right now. It’s—complicated.”

“Everything’s complicated.” Melvin shrugs. “Cut things off. Or out. Only way to fix it.”

“Can’t cut off anything without losing things I love.” Her job, which she adores. Her people. Her duality. Lies, everywhere. She’s drowning in them. “Unfortunately.”

“My mom says, _l’fum tzara agra_.”

Darcy blinks. “Um. My Hebrew is…bad. Like really bad. Really bad, Melvin.”

“Sorry.” He scuffs his foot over the floor. “It means, _As is the suffering, so the reward_. Y’know, hard work. Gives you dividends.”

Darcy rewinds the whip. “My sister says that. I didn’t know that was—”

“Jewish,” Melvin says. “Happens a lot.”

“Mm.” She doesn’t really know what to say other than that. It doesn’t feel like enough. “Yeah.”

“Thought it was words, before.” He knocks his knuckles to his temple. “Not so sure now. Few months ago, my mom, she, uh. Couple of kids jumped her on her walk home from temple. Beat her up. Broke her arm. Cops said, y’know. Antisemitic attack.”

 _Christ._ “Here in New York?”

“No, Los Angeles.” Melvin bounces on his toes. “She’s, uh. Still saying it. For me, I think. For herself, too, but for me. With my head.”

“Your head,” Darcy says, in a shaky voice, “is _fine.”_

“’s not,” says Melvin, “but. Nice of you to say.” He sways, back and forth, and she thinks of a tree, battered with axes, ready to topple. “Doing better, but. Hopin’ it’s true. Maybe for you too.”

“Yeah.” Her throat closes up. “Maybe.”  

“Wanted to ask you a favor,” says Melvin. “Know you can’t do it yourself. But. Maybe, if Betsy asks. Maybe you know someone who can help her? Just—a few things. I’d teach her, but I can’t—” He wets his lips. “Get flashbacks, trying.”

“Self-defense?”

“Yeah.”

No, she can’t do it herself. But—Darcy dumps her bag on the table, finds her phone, her regular-person phone with her regular-person contacts and Trish Walker in the address book. She taps off a text. _So a friend of mine was looking into self-defense. You think you know anyone?_ “I think—one second.”

Trish is glued to her phone, most of the time. It only takes about ten seconds before it’s marked _read,_ another three before the ellipsis starts bubbling. Then: _how advanced?_

_Basic._

_Then I can do it. Who are they?_

_Lemme check to see if she’s serious first. You’re a life-saver._ “I know someone,” Darcy says. “Who—she’s learning krav maga. She’s not a master, but she’s really good, and even if she can’t teach Betsy, she knows a bunch of teachers. She can probably find one to match.”

“The money—”

“We’ll figure something out.” The baton’s managed to roll all the way to the bottom of her bag, wrapped up in her lanyard. Darcy offers it to him, handle-first. “Thank you for the loan. But—I mean. You’re right, the baton isn’t—””

(— _glass falling inward, Grotto screaming, Frank crashing to the ground, the give of bone, blood and blood and blood, and a room she hasn’t dared look into yet_ —)

“—it’s not very Lilith,” she says. “Not really.”

“No,” says Melvin, sagely. “It isn’t. The whip is better.”

The whip, she thinks, can strangle. The whip could kill people. If she left it sparking, she could probably electrocute someone to death. Still, it’s not the same kind of visceral, immediate, bone-breaking violence. Not unless she uses it that way. Darcy settles the whip in a plastic bag, along with the charger, and hides it in her messenger bag. “Tell Betsy to let me know if she wants those lessons.”

“Where’re you going?” Melvin clasps his hands together. “Now.”

“Now? Like right now?”

He ducks his head. “Don’t wanna tell me, it’s fine, just—heard things, lately. About the yakuza. And other things. Other people. Y’know. Wanted to ask.”

Her watch reads 11:40. Darcy adds the gloves to her bag, zips it up again. When she squeezes Melvin’s wrist, he steadies out a little. Still jumpy as all hell, but—who knows. Steadier.

“I’m gonna go see my sister,” Darcy says. “I’ve been meaning to talk to her about something.”

.

.

.

Kate’s standing on one hand and she has been for nearly ten full minutes when someone knocks on the door.

 _Clint_ , is her first thought. It’s not the first time Clint’s forgotten his keys and needed her to let him in. Then: _Clint’s at the compound, he’d have called if he were on his way back._ Second thought? _Nat_. Or Wanda. But Nat wouldn’t knock, she’d just walk in, and Wanda—who knows what Wanda would do. Call. Text. Send her a sparkling red box with a question mark popping out of it like some kind of weird Zatanna Zatara thing. And none of those people would have Lucky lifting his head the way he is right now, his ears tipped and his one good eye wide open. He doesn’t bark, just goes hunter still, and Kate tucks and rolls off her hand up to her feet again, shaking her arm to get the blood flowing properly.

 _Probably looking for Clint._ People show up looking for Clint all the time. Half the time it’s neighbors, or tenants. The other half it’s Clint’s exes, and Kate knows better than to open the door for them anymore. _Like I need Bobbi Morse shouting at me again._ Because _that_ had been an adventure and a half, for serious. The last thing she really needs to know is intimate details of the sex lives of the Avengers and affiliated SHIELD agents, but apparently, she signed on for that when Clint wandered into  Nelson, Murdock, and Lewis to talk a copyright share deal.

It could also, she thinks, fumbling her bow out from behind the couch cushions, be tracksuit Russians. Some of them are still stupid enough to just knock on Clint’s door instead of, you know, staying the fuck away from the building forever and always. _You stupid, bro?_ Or—and this is the worst option, somehow—it could be Bruce Banner looking for a place to crash. Because _that’s_ happened before. Not that Dr. Banner isn’t totally chill and spends most of his time looking like the most professorial of professors ever, basically, but being in the same room as the Hulk gives her major heartburn.

The knock comes again, three sharp raps. Then: “I can hear you moving in there. Let me in, Kate, please.”

 _Miles?_ How the fuck did he find her? Her mouth is glue, all at once. Kate snags the nearest arrow she can reach, aims it at the door. _Bomb arrow_. Just her luck. _Christ, if he’s part of the yakuza—_ but no, if he were, what the hell would he be doing helping them, and Elena’s not a bad judge of character, Elena wouldn’t have—

“ _Please_ let me in,” he says. “I’m pretty sure they didn’t follow me but I don’t want to draw attention, Kate, please.”

She has to pinch the inside of her wrist very hard to get the words to come out her mouth. “How the hell did you find this place?”

“It’s hard to explain, all right?”

She sounds way shriller than she wants, a lot more like a little girl than a professional superhero. _Come on, Bishop. Big girl pants._ “Try anyway, because your options right now are _stalker_ or _majorly fucking creepy stalker_ and you’re not gonna like what’ll happen if either of those are right.”

“I’m not stalking you, just—” His voice dips and cracks a little. “Would you let me in? Please.”

“Not until you tell me how the fuck you found me, Morales.” She draws the arrow back against her cheek. “Five seconds.”

“Jesus, Kate, will you just—”

“Four,” she says, and resettles the arrow. “Three.”

“Kate, seriously—”

“I swear to God, Miles, I will shoot you if you don’t tell me, you have two seconds—”

“I don’t want to shout it at you through the door, all right, will you just—”      

“You have one fucking second or I will blow the door up and take you with it—”

“I know the yakuza are after you,” Miles says, very fast. “I know the yakuza are after you, I know who you are and I know why they want you dead, and I found you because I can—will you just open the door, Kate, please?”

Lucky still hasn’t turned his head away from the door. His ears are up, but his teeth aren’t bared. He’s interested, not defensive. _And Clint’s dog is smarter than Clint, half the time._ Or so Clint claims, anyway, but Clint is deeply depressed and has a shit opinion of himself, so Kate’s really not sure who’s right about that. She refolds her fingers on her bow. “And who am I?”

“You’re seriously gonna make me shout that through a _door_?”

“Hell yes I am. Who am I and why the hell should I trust you?”

Silence from the other side. Clint, she thinks, will be deeply unhappy if she blows up one of his walls, but for fuck’s sake, she’s pretty sure this qualifies as _necessary casualties._ If Miles is right on the other side of the door, then she can aim just slightly to the left. The explosion won’t hit him dead center, but it’ll blow the door and knock him silly, enough for her to beat the shit out of him without actually killing anyone. _And then I call Darcy and Matt, because Jesus Christ, how the hell did he even find me?_

“Jesus,” says Miles, half under his breath. He clears his throat. “Let me in, Hawkeye, please.”

Kate looks at Lucky. Lucky turns his head and blinks at her slowly with one eye. He settles his jaw on his paws again, and curls his tail around to gnaw on. She doesn’t lower the bow. “That’s still not a reason for me to trust you.”

“Will you just open the door?” He sounds exhausted, all of a sudden. “Kate, please. I’m not here to—to turn you over or reveal where you are to the yakuza or anything, okay? I want to help.”

“And I told you I don’t need help, Miles.”

“Look, will you just—” There’s a soft scuffing sound. A palm against wood, she thinks. Miles goes quiet for a bit. “I want to tell you something,” he says. “Please open the door.”

Kate squeezes the bow hard enough for the bones in her fingers to ache. Then, slowly, she lets her arms drop. _Why the fuck hasn’t Clint installed that surveillance camera yet?_ And then, almost immediately afterwards: _because he’s Clint, why would he do anything that had anything to do with common sense?_ She’d thought _Matt_ had been bad, but Jesus Christ, no one beats Clint Barton for guilt complexes and self-loathing. Half the time she wonders if he’s doing the shit that he does to get himself killed. _A stick and string from the Paleolithic Era, for fuck’s sake._ Though what that says about her, she has no idea. “You have a gun?”

“Hell no, Bishop. I hate guns.”

“You try anything, I’ll put a bolt through your head.”

“Backing away from the door,” Miles says, and sure enough his voice fades a little, gets muzzy. “You unlock it, I’ll come in when you tell me. Okay?”

“Don’t placate me,” Kate snaps, but she does what he says anyway, undoes the chain and the three deadbolts (that, at least, she’d been able to wrangle before Clint had noticed her putting in the work order) before switching the bomb arrow out with a regular bolt, and stepping back. “Okay.”

Miles has his hands up when he slips in through the gap. His T-shirt is beat up and worn, _Brooklyn Visions Academy_ written across it in white. He kicks the door shut, and blinks at her, and it’s only then that Kate realizes that she’s still only wearing a sports bra and gym shorts. She absolutely fucking refuses to blush right now.

“Talk,” she says. She doesn’t lower the bow. “How the hell did you find me?”

“I’ve been looking all over the city.” He swallows, almost audibly, when she pulls the arrow further back against her cheek. If she released it from this range, it’d go right through him and stick in the wall behind. “Nobody told me, not Darcy or Elena or anyone. You don’t have to worry about that.”

 _Like I would worry about Darcy giving me up._ And she hadn’t said a word to Elena before she left. She’s still texting her, though, about Ahagon stuff, but Elena has no more clue where she is than the moon does. “Still doesn’t explain how you found me.”

“It took me all week, it’s not like it was effortless.” Miles curls the fingers of his right hand up. “Can I, um. There’s something in my pocket, it’ll help explain.”

“What, your tracking device? Did you chip me or something?”

“Ah, no.” He links his fingers together at the back of his neck. “It’s really hard to talk to you when you have an arrow in my face, okay, I thought it’d get easier with practice but it really, really doesn’t—”

 _Practice?_ “Explain,” Kate says, and for the first time her voice shakes. “Explain _now_.”

“It’s easier just to show you—”

“Miles, will you just—”

“Just—let me get the thing out of my pocket, okay, I’m not going to—”

“ _Spit it out_!”

Miles’s face screws up, oddly. He flicks his wrist. There’s a little noise, a little zipping _thwip_ , and then her arrow’s been snatched from her. Not the bow, just the arrow, snapped back into Miles’s hand, tangled at one end with something sticky and pale and disgustingly familiar. She looks at the arrow, then at her bow, then at his face, then at her bow again, and when he says, “I can explain,” she just shakes her head and stares.

“Please tell me that’s part of a really detailed cosplay.”

“Um.” He ducks his head, barely looking at her. “Not—not really, no.”

“You have proof of that, or—”

Miles fumbles in his pocket, and draws free a mess of black and red. A mask, with sharply cut eyes, webbing patterns across the front. He offers it to her, and waits. Kate looks at the mask, and then at Miles, and then slowly takes it from his fingers and spreads it out over her palm. Could still be cosplay, sure, but… _you have to be fucking kidding me._

“You live in my _building_ ,” she says.

“Kate—”

Kate fists her hand around the mask. “What the _fuck_ is your problem?”

“I—”

“You _live in my fucking building_!”

“I can afford the rent!”

“Did you—Jesus Christ, did you play nice with Elena just to—”

“No!” Miles shakes his head like a bobblehead. “No, that was—that just happened, that wasn’t—”

“How did you even find it, did you _follow me—_ ”

“It was listed online!”

“You motherfucker,” she says, and throws the mask at him. He catches it without looking away from her. “You’re _Spider-Man_.”

Miles winces. “Shout it a little louder, why don’t you.”

“You’re _fucking Spider-Man._ ” It feels like she should be rattling the windows, with how loud she gets. “You _fucking asshole_! You could have fucking said something—”

“I didn’t know if I could trust you!”

“So you move into my building and _spy on me_?”

“That wasn’t what I was doing!”

“I don’t run a halfway house for superheroes, Miles—”

“I never thought you did, that’s not why I—”

“Then what the fuck were you thinking, coming into my building—”

“ _That you would understand_ ,” Miles snaps, and then looks shocked at his own daring. Kate opens her mouth, but no more words come out. “I thought if anyone, any—any landlord or _whatever_ would be able to understand—stuff, then it’d be, y’know, someone—someone else who has—stuff.”

She blinks a few times. “I don’t. Have stuff.”

“You totally have stuff,” he says. “You just—practiced, to get your stuff. All that happened to me was that my uncle was an idiot.”

Miles runs out of words, after that. Kate kind of sinks down onto the edge of the sofa, her bow awkwardly jamming into the space just beneath her kneecap. Lucky heaves himself off the couch, and clicks his way into the kitchen to scarf something out of the garbage bag. She doesn’t have the brain to stop him.

“I can move out, if you want,” says Miles. “I would need like two days to get Ganke to help me, but—I can move out.”

“Don’t be stupid.” She settles her bow on her knees, and refuses to meet his eyes. There’s a kind of bone-deep relief hovering around his mouth that’s distracting. “You don’t have to move out just because you lied to me.”

“I didn’t want to lie, I just—”

“Didn’t know if you could trust me.” Kate snaps the bow back and forth. It’s bad for the bow, but this isn’t her baby, this is one of the practice bows, so she doesn’t feel too bad. “How did you know where to find me?”

“I can, um. There’s this—” He stops, and rubs a hand over his mouth. “I, uh. Haven’t told anyone this in a long time, sorry. My—I have really strong senses.”

“That sounds familiar,” says Kate under her breath.

“What?”

“Nothing. So you what, smelled me?”

“Not—exactly. I can—it’s like something in my head itches, or vibrates, or something, when there’s something dangerous, or—I don’t know. Something I need to notice.”

“I’m dangerous.”

Miles shrugs. “I mean, you were just pointing an arrow in my face.”

That’s. Valid. Okay. “So you crisscrossed the entire city waiting for something in your skull to buzz?”

He rubs at his mouth again. “Sort of. Yeah.”

Kate puts her head between her knees. She can hear Miles fussing in the background, but the buzzing in her ears is kind of overtaking everything right now, and she really needs to breathe. “Spider-Man lives in my building,” she says. And then: “Fucking hell, can I get _no one_ normal in my life?”

“Elena counts as normal.”

“Elena’s dad was a freedom fighter in the Dominican Republic, she basically led a tenant uprising against Wilson Fisk, and she knows how to gut you with a knife six different ways before you get a foot in the door, that’s not normal.” She shuts her eyes. “Jesus Christ. Fucking hell. You’re an asshole.”

“I’m sorry.”

She sweeps her hair up out of her face, presses her fingers into her eyes. “Why are you telling me this now as opposed to like—weeks ago?”

“The yakuza weren’t trying to kill you weeks ago.” He hesitates. “I didn’t—trust you. Weeks ago.”

Also valid. Kate clears her throat. “And you trust me now?”

Miles’s mouth squeezes into a weird comma shape, somehow. “I guess.”

“You guess?”

“I do,” he says, and something squeezes hard under her ribs. “Yeah.”

Kate has to cough, to speak again. “So, what, you want to be my bodyguard?”

“Kind of irresponsible if I let my landlady die.”

Words prickle on her tongue. “I’m not going to die. I can take care of myself, Miles.”

“I know.” Miles hooks his hands into his jeans pockets. “I’ve just—had enough of seeing people get shot.”

She’d think he was playing her, if it weren’t for the emptiness in how he says it, how he turns his face away and presses his lips together afterwards, silent but not, all at once. Kate sighs deep through her nose, and goes back to rubbing her eyes.

“I don’t need a bodyguard,” she says again. “I don’t—I can handle myself.”

“I know.” And he actually might, she thinks, looking at him. Considering the number of times she’s nearly shot Spider-Man in the face, she can believe it, when he says it. “I just—thought I would offer my help. If—if you wanted it.”

“And finally get around to telling me that you’re a vigilante.”

“Yeah, um. That too.” Miles kind of peeks at her sideways, bites his lip. “If you want me to go—”

“Nah.” She stands, and goes to drag Lucky out of the garbage bag. “I’ve been stuck here on my own for a week, Miles, I’m bored spitless. I don’t need a bodyguard, but—but I could use a distraction.”

She can see the smile out of the corner of her eye, bursting like the sunrise, and _Christ_ , this isn’t fair. _I don’t need this going on in my head right now._ Or anywhere else, for that matter. Kate seizes Lucky by the scruff of the neck, drags him out of the bag. “I have to go to work in a few hours, but I can—I don’t know. There’s TV or something.”

“I’ve caught up on all my shows.”

“There have to be some things you haven’t seen.”

“Oh, yeah, nerdboy?” Kate shoos Lucky out of the kitchen, and leans her bow up against the counter. “Try me.”

.

.

.

She’s just turned the corner on to the street bearing Jen’s building when she thinks that maybe she hasn’t weighed the consequences of this.

Darcy rolls her neck until it cracks, and turns right, trying to angle into the shadows as best she can. (She’s not much of a fan of the walking thing, though. It’s been weeks since Frank was captured, and she’s _still_ sore from going to Flushing. It might be just her imagination, or she might be torqueing sore muscles when she goes out every night, but either way, pain, okay?) Going to Jen’s, she tells herself, doesn’t exactly mean that she’s going to tell Jen who she is and what she does. She’s coming because Jen asked her to come, not because she’s going to like—spill her guts or anything.

She’s going to, obviously. But it’s not like it’s _required._

Shit. This feels like right before she’d started coming out as bi to people, all twisty and nervous, anxiety wriggling in her throat. Except like—times a million, because _Hey, I’m bi, just FYI_ is much different from _Hey, I beat guys twice my size up in the middle of the night and wear a mask and have a following on Twitter that’s somewhere in the range of forty-seven thousand people, as an aside._ She hates lying to Jen, but when Jen had been in the DA’s office, she had to lie. Logically, it had been the only option. You don’t tell your ADA sister that you’re running around playing vigilante. You just _don’t_. It’s not anywhere close to common sense. But now—she presses her headphones closer against her head when a guy on the sidewalk tries to get her attention, refuses to think of the whip curled into her messenger bag—now is something new. Now is a Jen that has nothing to do with the DA’s office, a Jen that’s told Samantha Reyes to go fuck herself, a Jen who’d said _I know there’s something you’re not telling me._ This isn’t logical. This is a different beast entirely.

In a way, she thinks, Matt has a point when he says it’s safer to not tell more people, just because of statistics. But for fuck’s sake, Jen is her sister. They’re a weird, fucked-up little family, all of them, her and Matt and Foggy and Karen, Jen and Kate; even Ben in his own way, the awkward, grumpy uncle who gets pissed about dumb mistakes. (And Christ, having Ben Urich come in to lecture them about taking on Castle’s case is something she _never wants to go through again_. She’d thought back with Fisk that Ben would be shit-scary, if his anger was thrown at you. Disappointment? Is way, way worse. Her ears are still burning days later.) Having the whole family know but one is—it’s weird. It’s _weird_ , a skin-crawling kind of weird, a burn-your-tongue kind of weird, a weird that hangs on her like chains. And maybe she’s not thinking enough, and maybe she hasn’t made the best decisions lately—none of them have made the best decisions lately, not her, not Matt, not Karen or Kate, not even Foggy—but this: this is a good choice. This is the right choice. She’s certain of it.

It’s strange, going back to Jen’s apartment. Or not strange, exactly. She feels out of place in it, but not quite in the same way as she did right after Fisk. Not because she’s changed, but because the apartment itself has changed. This is Karen and Jen’s space, now, and even though there’s evidence of where Darcy used to be, it’s been covered up and shifted by other, newer things. Like how the blanket that’s on the back of the couch is one of Karen’s, instead of the red and gold one that Darcy had saved for six months to buy (because goddammit if she isn’t going to pick up all the Gryffindor shit she can, all right?). Or how there are strawberries in the fridge now, where there never used to be before, thanks to Darcy’s allergy. (The artificial strawberry syrup is still in the cabinet, though. She makes a mental note to steal it. Artificial chemical shit is fine. Actual strawberries make it impossible to breathe.) Going back to Jen’s place in the middle of the day and having Jen actually, y’know, _be_ there is odd all on its own, but seeing Jen in a pair of boxer shorts at one in the afternoon? That’s inherently unsettling. “Didn’t think you’d be here for another twenty minutes,” she says, and rubs a hand over the back of her neck. Her glasses are slipping down her nose. “You said one-thirty.”

“I needed to get the fuck out of dodge.” Darcy steps out of her shoes. “We haven’t even started on jury selection yet and people are going crazy. If I have to look at another report that has evidence and testimony and interview records all mixed together then I will probably strangle someone. I think Reyes is having interns like—layer it all together just to slow us down.”

Jen’s nose wrinkles. “That’s p-petty of her.”

“It’s been making life super interesting. Like, the Cybermen versus the Daleks interesting, but minus all the sick burns.” Darcy drops down hard on the couch, and flops sideways to press her cheek to the cushions. Darla’s hiding under the armchair, her evil yellow eyes narrowed. “Hey, bitchcat. Miss me?”

Darla’s eyes go even thinner. Her tail starts to twitch over her paws.  

“How’s she doing with Rey?”

“Decently. They haven’t fought once. I d-don’t know exactly what kind of training Rey’s had, but she’s an incredibly polite little thing, and for some reason D-Darla hasn’t tried a single damn trick.” When Darcy peeks through her eyelashes, Jen’s watching her, half-frowning. “You want coffee?”

“Goddamn yes please.”

“G-Get your ass up and get it, then,” says Jen, and Darcy whines her way up to verticality to follow Jen into the kitchen. Out of the corner of her eye, there’s a flash of white fur. Darla’s following them. When Jen settles in a chair, the cat curls her tail around her paws, and keeps on watching them.

“Hey, bitchcat,” Darcy says again, and scoops her up off the floor. Darla makes a noise like a deflating tire. “You’re not bitey today.”

Jen gives Darla a look of deep suspicion. “She’s been…not. Bitey.”

“Really?”

“Like she’s b-been brainwashed.”

 _What the hell did you say to the ragebeast, Chat?_ “You’re being nice for once, kitty?”

“It’s weird,” says Jen, flatly, and sets a second mug of coffee on the dining table. “Sit down before you fall over. I was going to order food, and th-then decided that would be a bad idea until I have a job, so. Curry or pasta?”

“Which one’s reheated?”

“Both.”

Darcy watches as Darla curls up into a ball on her lap—which is also the _weirdest fucking thing,_ Jesus—and then says, “Curry.”

“Cool.”

“So what’s with the lunch invite?” Darcy scrapes her nails into the fur behind Darla’s ears. “Not that, you know, I’m like—not okay with coming over for food, because it’s food and I miss you and shit, but you sounded kind of…off when I talked to you yesterday.”

“It’s b-been an off kind of week.” Jen doesn’t look at her, keeps her back turned as she messes with the microwave, with tupperware. “Just—in general.”

“Yeah, no, for sure.” Jen’s shoulders are hitching up. Darcy purses her lips. “Jennifer Lynn.”

Jen jacks up an eyebrow. “Darcy Ann.”

“Ugh, don’t full name me.”

“You started it.”

“Whatever.” _Live life dangerously, Lewis._ She catches one of Darla’s paws, presses her thumb into the pad of her foot and spreads her toes out. Darla doesn’t even flinch. “What’s up, coffee cup?”

“That’s a Foggy-ism.” Jen smacks a spoon against the counter. “Just—I’ve been thinking a lot the p-past week, is all. About what I want to do and where I w-want to go. It’s just—it’s complicated. I don’t—I don’t know what I want to d-do, outside of the law.”

“And you didn’t want to think alone?”

“Not exactly? Just—” There goes the other eyebrow. “Well, yes. But also no.”

She doesn’t elaborate. Which means bad things. Bad and nosy things. “I mean, you’re rocking some guns lately, you could always go into weight-lifting. You’re getting goddamn built, Jen.”

Jen snorts. “I d-decided after last year that b-being able to defend myself was more important than fitting into my suits properly. Karen’s been helping me with s-seam adjustments.”

“Karen, really?”

“Mm. She made that throw blanket, actually. It’s p-pretty impressive.”

“Oh,” says Darcy, quietly. “Didn’t know she could do that.”

“She says she does it when she’s stressed. She’s been s-sewing a lot, lately.” Jen throws a glance over her shoulder. “She asked me if I’d be willing to be a source in a story on Frank Castle last week.”

…. _uh-oh._ “Ben’s story?”

“Mm.” She doesn’t meet Darcy’s eyes, getting bowls down out of the cabinets, scrounging a second spoon from the drawer. “Since I resigned, they figured I might want t-to go over what I know with them. Give them background, let them know what Reyes’s p-plans were.”

Holy fucking Christballs. “What’d you say?”

Jen shrugs. “That I’d think about it.”

And if Jen’s thinking about it, then—welp. _Karen could have told me._ They need to call another all-group meeting, if shit like this is going down and nobody’s mentioning it. _What happened to tell everyone everything except for when it might make Foggy uncomfortable?_ Though—honestly? _Wouldn’t surprise me if she just forgot._ She hadn’t been joking, back in Frank’s room. Karen’s been sleeping less than she has, Darcy’s sure of it. Matt keeps making this weird face when Karen walks by, the way he only used to when Karen would call Darcy at four in the morning and walk by the waterfront with her. Whatever Karen’s doing at night, whether it has to do with her homeless kids, or her memories, or with Frank, she’s not sleeping much at all.

“You okay?” Jen says, and Darcy jumps. “You’re hitting p-panda territory with the rings under your eyes.”

“Nragh.”

“Untranslatable.”

“Whatever, I’ve had a bad month.” Darcy ducks her head to peer at the cat, letting her hair hide her face. “Or year, I dunno. It’s been—really complicated.”

“With Castle?”

“With everything.” Darcy lets go of Darla’s paw. “With—with Matt and with the firm and with Castle and—and with everything, basically. Way more than it has any right to be.”

“Mm.” Jen goes back to tapping at bowls, waiting for the microwave to peep. Darcy peeks through her hair again, and turns back to Darla, scraping with her nails down Darla’s spine until she stretches out all four feet like a kitten, claws nipping out at the air. “What happened with Matt?”

“We argued. It’s better now.”

Jen grunts.

“It’s fine, Jen, seriously, just—it’s better now.”

“I can still b-beat him up.”

“Don’t beat up my boyfriend,” she says. “I can do that myself.”

“Fine. You beat him up, I suspend him from the B-Brooklyn Bridge.”

“We’re not quite there, I don’t think. I’ll let you know if that changes.”

“Fine,” Jen says again. She pops her knuckles, one-two-three-four, then her wrist. Then, carefully, she says, “I noticed the b-bandage. Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, um.” She clears her throat. “Kind of a long story.”

Jen hums. “Okay.”

“…that’s it?” 

“I don’t want you to tell me anything you d-don’t feel comfortable telling me.” The microwave goes off. Jen switches the pasta bowl out for the curry bowl, and starts it up again. “Just—if you’re ready, I c-can listen. That’s all.”

Jennifer Lynn “North Star” Walters, for fuck’s sake. “Okay.” She sounds a little wet. “Um—yeah. Okay.”

Jen falls quiet, but not in a waiting way. Just an _all right_ sort of way. A thinking sort of way. She pushes the bowl of curry across the table to Darcy, and starts spinning her fork through the reheated pasta.

_I’m so goddamn sick of lies._

“I’m Lilith,” Darcy says, all at once. Jen doesn’t look up from her noodles.

“I figured as much.”

She doesn’t sound angry. Just kind of— _oh. Okay._ A little relieved maybe. Air hissing from a pneumatic lock, a release. Darcy swallows. “Did you guess?”

“Yeah.”

“When?”

“Maybe right after the New Year, I think. Or I d-didn’t know, then, but it occurred to me. I d-didn’t want to believe it.”

Right after the New Year. After Fisk, before Jess. She can’t really even remember what was going on right after the New Year. “…oh.”

“You had a bruise,” Jen says. “On your neck. And I remember you saying you were on the subway, and someone j-jammed you into a pole, but it made me think of right after Fisk, and—and everything that happened, and, I don’t know. It c-came into my head, the idea. And things started lining up, but I d-didn’t really want to believe it.”

Her stomach aches. “You didn’t?”

“No, not—not at first.” Jen stabs half a plum tomato with her fork, and looks at it. “I thought—I d-don’t know. I didn’t like that you felt like you c-couldn’t tell me. Or that you didn’t t-trust me enough to tell me. Whichever one it was. I knew logically that it would have been a b-bad idea, if you did, especially considering how Reyes feels about v-vigilantes, but—but it stung. And I wouldn’t be t-truthful if I said that that wasn’t part of the reason I’ve been so b-busy, lately.”

There are crabs pinching at her sinuses. “I—um.”

“I understand why you didn’t,” says Jen again. “But it—hurt.”

“It hurt not to say anything,” Darcy tells her coffee cup.

“A few months ago I realized I was b-being a bit of a hypocrite, though,” says Jen, and Darcy blinks up at her, confused. “Because there are…things. I haven’t t-told you. That I wasn’t _allowed_ to tell you, not—not when they happened. And l-legally I still c-can’t. I signed p-papers.”

“Is this about where you stayed, when—when Fisk was doing his thing?”

“Sort of.” She cuts the tomato half into pieces. “My cousin—not on your side, on—on my mom’s side. He’s—a complicated person. Used t-to work for the military as a scientist. But there was—” Jen stares hard at the ceiling, rubs hard at the space between her eyebrows. “You c-can’t tell anyone I told you this.”

“Jen, if it’s about the military then maybe—”

“The military can k-kiss my ass.”

 _Well. Okay then_. “Okay.”

“Not even Matthew,” Jen says. “All right? You—I’m b-breaking a great many laws, telling you this. But—”

She stops. _But you told me your biggest secret,_ Darcy thinks. Or _but this might help you understand._ Or just _but I want to_. She can see them all, in Jen’s face. She pulls her hand from Darla’s clutches, reaches out across the table, and Jen takes it. “Okay.”

Jen clutches hard at Darcy’s fingers. “There was—an accident. While—while he was working for the military. You’d just st-started living at Columbia when it happened. The military c-came to see me, told me—told me that if he contacted me I was legally obligated to inform them. That he was a fugitive. He never d-did, he’s not stupid and he would have known they’d come after me first, I’m his only living relative, really, but it—scared me. I d-didn’t know what happened. He was on the run for—for years.”

Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ, to quote _Outlander._ Her head whirls. Darcy shuts her eyes, trying to process that. Another cousin—he’d have to be a Banner, if it were on Jen’s mom’s side, and that would make this guy…what, her second-cousin once-removed? Something like that? She’s not good with the removal thing—and he’s not only a fugitive from justice but a fugitive from the _military_ , holy shit, and Jen never said a word, Jen working in the DA’s office with her cousin on the lam and not being allowed to say a goddamn word, holy shit. “You never said anything.”

“Legal obligations,” says Jen again. “I couldn’t even acknowledge he was my c-cousin. They had documents I had to sign, or—it was v-very heavy-handed. Probably illegal, but I c-couldn’t fight the US military, I was b-barely used to the DA’s office, and the agreements were—were v-very well drafted. Couldn’t have p-poked a hole in them if I’d tried.”

“You could have,” Darcy says, and Jen’s lips quirk.

“Well, p-probably. But I was frightened they’d hurt my c-cousin. And you were—I mean. You were eighteen. I d-didn’t want to make things difficult.”

And she hadn’t even noticed. “Jen—”

“I’m glad you never realized,” says Jen. “Th-That was the point. I tried very hard to make sure you d-didn’t. And they only c-came to the apartment once. I never heard from him, and I never saw those bastards from the military again after that one d-day.”

“Still—”

“You were eighteen, and even if you were a legal adult you were still in my ch-charge. You didn’t need to know. I d-didn’t want you getting involved with the military.”

Darcy settles for holding tight to Jen’s hand. “Okay.” 

“He finally contacted me again right after—right after the incident. To see if I was okay.” She takes a breath. “When—when you asked us to hide, from Fisk,  me and Elena, that was the first time I’d seen him since I was—maybe twelve? Twelve. But I remember—when I saw him, I asked him, what—what d-did the military want him for? What happened? And—and he had this look, on his face. Not—I d-don’t know. Like a secret.” She lifts her eyes. “You h-have the same look. Or you did, when I would ask about your b-bruises. Like there was a secret too heavy for you, and you d-didn’t know how to explain it.”

Darcy stares hard at the table. “You—you hid with your cousin, then.”

“Bruce,” says Jen. “Yes, I hid with Bruce. And a friend of his. I was going to tell you where, before, but then things were—out of hand. And now B-Bruce is on the run again, so it wound up…not being relevant.”

“Did the army—”

“Little more complicated than that.” She shakes her head. “And that’s—I d-don’t want to get into Bruce right now. Not—not right now.”

Yeah, no. That she can understand. She’s interested in this mysterious cousin on the run from the law— _does this shit run in the family, or what?_ —but…no. Not right now. “Okay.”

Jen stares at Darcy’s knuckles. There are marks there, now, little divots. Fresh scars, old scabs that have grown over. The pale scar on the back of her left hand from Nobu. For once, Jen doesn’t look away from them, and Darcy doesn’t tuck them out of sight. _These are my hands, now_. Bruised and battered and turning into disasters. 

“Does Matthew know?” Jen swallows. “I imagine he’d have to, but—”

“Matt knows.”

She bobs her head a few times. “And Foggy and Karen and Kate?”

Shit. “How did—”

“They flank you,” Jen says. “All of th-them. Excuse-wise. They’d c-come up with good reasons, for why you weren’t there, or why there were cuts. Karen is—better at it than Foggy is, but they both d-do it. And Kate—” She closes her hand tight around Darcy’s fingers. “I mean. Kate’s not p-particularly difficult to work out.”

“Hawkeye is Hawkeye,” says Darcy, and Jen nods. She’s trembling, for some stupid reason. Some stupid goddamn reason. She’d _wanted_ to tell Jen this, just—why is she so shaky? “So.”

“So.” Jen tucks her hair back out of her face. “D-Does anyone else know?”

“Ben,” Darcy says. “He—guessed. I’ve never told him.”

“And he’s—”

“He likes me too much to get me arrested.” She shrugs. “I’m one of his best sources, he’s not about to give that up. And besides, he knows what’d happen to me if he said anything, he won’t.”

Jen unwinds, slowly. “Who else?”

“Um, Claire. And Santino.”

“The nurse you stayed with, and her brother?”

Not her brother, not exactly. But close enough. “Mm.”

“And no one else?”

She’s not about to go into Frank or Elektra right now. “A few,” Darcy says. “People who—not anyone you know, not really.” Outside of Jess and Trish, but Jen doesn’t talk to Jess or Trish all that much. It works out. “People I trust.”

“Will they tell?”

“No.”

“Okay,” says Jen. “Okay.”

Her palm’s sweating. Darcy doesn’t let go. On her lap, Darla stretches out again, and then curls into a tight ball, tucking her tail over her nose. She sniffs, and wipes her face with the back of her hand. “I thought you would ask more questions.”

“D-Do you want me to ask more questions?” says Jen, sounding far too sensible. “Do you want me to ask who Daredevil is or—or how often you’ve nearly been k-killed or how it happened in the first place or if something’s—or what you d-do every night? Do you want me to ask that?”

“I mean—” She almost chokes on it. “If—if you want to ask. I can’t—answer everything.”

“I don’t know that I need to.” She thinks, for a moment, that Jen might pull away from her. Instead, Jen digs her nails hard into the back of Darcy’s hand, squeezing so tight it creaks. “Is there something you w-want to tell me? That you want me to ask?”

Her vision blurs. Darcy blinks, furiously. “I don’t—I don’t know. Just—I thought—I thought you’d ask more questions.”

“Okay.” Jen closes her eyes, presses her lips together. Her fingers are trembling. “Okay. I—I don’t really have any, but one.”

One question is a lot better and a lot worse than she’d expected. “Ask.”

“Why?” says Jen, simply. “You—I know you, Darcy. You—you’ve always had something, something—not d-dark, not exactly, but—”

“Shadows,” Darcy says, thinking of Sylvia Plath. “Maybe.”

“Shadows or secrets, I don’t know, but having—having shadows or secrets or any of it doesn’t t-translate to—” She waves her free hand. “I just—I want t-to understand. Why. I think I have an idea, but—but I want you to explain it. To me. Because otherwise I’m not sure I’ll be able to—to get it.”

“Why I’m Lilith?”

She nods. Darcy lifts her eyes to the ceiling, to the lightbulb, to the little door out onto the widow’s walk where she’d fired a bullet to at a dumpster to chase off Stick the Truly Terrible. This place isn’t hers anymore, not really, but there are too many memories here for her to have not left stains in it. Bloodstains or tearstains or just old memories, laughter and divots in the walls. There’s still a chip out of the edge of the table where she’d whacked it with a knife by accident one day. (The story’s long, and complicated, so don’t ask.) She’d lived here for just about ten years, and that kind of thing leaves traces, on people and on places. Darcy pushes her glasses up her nose with her free hand, and forces the knives in her throat back down into their hiding spots.

“When I was in elementary school, I had a friend,” she says. “His name was Eli.”

Jen’s quiet for the whole of it, for the whole long, terrible drag of it. She’s quiet for the details, for the nightmares, for the sordidness and the terror of Fisk, the wax-museum grotesquery of Nobu. She’s quiet, and she’s still, aside from her hands trembling in Darcy’s. She only shifts twice, once when Darcy says, “I wanted to kill him,” and again when she talks about Fisk in Matt’s apartment, about the taser and the hands and the mix-up with Karen. The food’s cold by the time Darcy is done, but she doesn’t have an appetite anymore. She can’t meet Jen’s eyes. Darla’s fallen asleep, curled up into the tightest ball Darcy’s ever seen her manage, tail tucked over her nose. It’s only once the silence has rung out for a good minute that Jen gets up.

“Jen—”

“Look at me,” Jen says, and this is so much worse than the argument outside of the courthouse, because Jen’s openly crying, tears pouring down her cheeks. “Darcy, sweetheart, please look at me.”

Darcy can’t manage it for a bit. Her vision’s blurred. Jen’s crouched down beside her chair, balanced on the balls of her feet as she detaches Darla from Darcy’s knees and shoos her away across the tile. She takes both of Darcy’s hands in hers again, squeezes. “Look at me,” she says, one last time, and Darcy finally meets her eyes, all the blotchiness and the agony. “How many people know?”

“About all of it or about—” She bites her tongue. “About Eli?”

“About Eli.”

“Um.” She can’t swallow. “Um, Matt. And Foggy.”

“No one else?”

“No.”

Jen studies Darcy’s hands again.

“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t know how,” Darcy says. She’s a sock puppet, her voice turned inside-out. “I didn’t—I didn’t know how, Jen, I never told anyone, not until the devil—”

“I don’t c-care that you didn’t tell me, I’m not angry, I’m—” Jen reaches up to tuck Darcy’s hair behind her ear. “I’m—Darcy, I’m s-so sorry.”

She opens her mouth, and nothing comes out but a tiny, crackling whine. Darcy shuts her eyes.

“I’m so sorry you had to deal with it alone,” Jen says. Her voice is a wreck. “And I’m sorry I n-never noticed when you were—”

“Jen, no—”

“Let me finish—”

“None of it was your fault, Jen, that’s not—”

“You were h-hurting so badly for so long and I d-didn’t _see_ any of it, I never asked, I didn’t—” _No, Jen, please don’t cry, please please please don’t cry,_ but it’s too late. “Darcy, I’m so, so sorry—”

“You don’t have to apologize, please don’t apologize, it wasn’t because of you—”

“You’re my sister,” Jen says. “Darcy, _you’re my sister_ , I should have—I should have asked or noticed or d-d-done something—”

She can’t stop herself. Darcy makes a terrible, ragged sound, and puts her face in her hands, and Jen’s wrapped around her before she can take a full breath, dragging her down out of the chair and wrapping her arms around her tight enough that the bruises on her ribs and the cut on her arm and her heart all turn raw and terrible at once. “I’m sorry,” Darcy says, and Jen shakes her head and kisses her hair, holds on tighter. “Jen, I’m sorry, I didn’t know what to say or how to say it or—”

“Don’t.”

“But—”

“ _Don’t_ ,” Jen says again. Tears drip off her nose. She’s going to break something in one or both of them, she’s holding on so tight. “None of that is your fault. _None_ of that is your fault, not—not Georgia and not Fisk and not Lilith and not any of it, d-don’t apologize, don’t you _dare_ say sorry—”

“But—”

“I should have seen it,” Jen says. “I should have seen it and n-never did and I’m so sorry, Darcy—”

“Jen, please don’t cry, I lied to you and I shouldn’t—”

“ _No._ ” She catches Darcy’s face in her hands. “Darcy—Darcy, listen to me, look at me. Don’t apologize, don’t—I’m not angry with you. For not t-telling me, I’m not—” She takes a rattling breath. “I’m angry with m-myself, not with you.”

“But I didn’t—”

“I’m not angry with you,” she says again. “I’m not—Darcy, I’m _so proud of you_.”

And yeah, well. There’s no point in trying to keep from crying after that.

.

.

.

The phone rings.

“This is Ben Urich.”

“Ben.” Her voice is wet. “This is Jennifer Walters.”

Silence, for a moment. “New phone number?”

“Burner.” Jen coughs. “Thought it might be a good idea to start using one, just in c-case. Besides, I had it lying around.”

“You never struck me as the type to have burner phones lying around, Walters.”

“Yeah, well. Lots of things you d-don’t know about me, Ben.” A beat. “A week ago you asked if I w-would help write an exposé on the DA’s office.”

“And you said no,” he says, careful.

“I said I would th-think about it.”

“With you, that generally means no.”

She laughs. “Yeah, well. I’m ch-changing my mind.”

He’s too old, he thinks, for his heart to jump like that. “You sure?”

“I’m certain. I’m d-done with sitting on my ass.” She takes a breath. “And I’m done letting my little sister take on all this shit without me.”

 _Ah, Lewis._ Woman doesn’t understand the concept of a secret. Though in a way, it’s probably keeping her sane. “She’s not alone.”

“No,” says Jen, slowly. “But you don’t know my sister like I d-do, Mr. Urich. She’s overstretching. I c-can see it. She doesn’t get support, let herself g-get support, she’s going to fall apart. And she’s my sister, I’m not—not letting that happen if I c-can help it.”

He thinks of Karen, Karen’s exhaustion, the ferocity, the _rage_. “If we’re talking about people falling apart, then I don’t think Lewis is the only one we have to worry about.”

“Karen,” says Jen, and Ben doesn’t have to say anything. She’s too tired to not already know. “I live with one and raised the other, I’m more than aware.” Another beat of silence, of thought. “Though I learned today that I don’t—that there have been things I…missed. That I shouldn’t have.”

He doesn’t know what to say. Ben leans back in his desk chair, taps his pen to his notebook. “Never had kids,” he says, eventually. “Don’t know what it’s like. Lewis turned out all right.”

“I c-can’t tell you much about what they’re doing now. In the DA’s office. Nobody’s telling me anything. I r-resigned, nobody’s allowed to say anything. But I can give you a name.”

“I have moles in the office, Jen.”

“Not like this one.” Jen hesitates. It echoes over the phone like a fork on a crystal goblet. “She’s p-probably talked to you before. Just—not openly.”

A leak in the DA’s office, emails in the dark. Rdglo329. “Oh?”

“Don’t _oh_ me, you know exactly who I’m talking about.” There’s a creak, a whine of an old couch. “You ever had the p-pleasure of meeting Miss Angela Chonggu Huang in person, Mr. Urich?”

“…who?”

The hum to her laugh is all Lewis’s worst _oh, you poor lost soul_ voice. He’s starting to think that Lewis, contrary to popular belief, has picked up a lot more from Jen Walters than she even realizes. “I have to go and meet her tomorrow to talk about an idea I’ve been tossing b-back and forth with her. You can come, if you want. She’ll probably be expecting it.”

“You think she’ll talk?”

“If you’re nice.” Walters draws it out. “And if you treat her monkey right.”

“What?”

“There’s a c-café called Carvel’s, across from the Supreme Court,” Walters says. “B-Be there tomorrow at nine. Angie will help you.”

“How do you know?”

“How’d you know that K-Karen would help, with Union Allied?”

He’s quiet, for a second. “She offered.”

“Exactly,” says Walters. “Nine o’clock, Mr. Urich.”

She hangs up. Ben sits at his computer for a minute, for two, and then he gets up to go and check on his wife. She’s had a good few days, and going over some of the details of this with her—it’ll keep his head clearer when he meets a monkey tomorrow.

.

.

.

For once, they’re all in the office at the same time when Darcy gets back from Jen’s. She waves hello to Foggy, and to Karen, who’s on the phone, before slipping into her office and shutting the door behind her. Matt’s already on his feet, or halfway there, anyway, still holding a file of pages etched in braille, his glasses set aside on the desktop, curving and arching like a ribcage. “Hey, what happened?”

Darcy shakes her head, and dumps her bag on her desk.

“Darcy,” he says, because he can probably smell it on her, all the tears, but she shakes her head a second time and walks right into him, winding her arms tight around his ribs and pressing her nose into his collarbone. Matt coughs. “Wow, hey.”

“Hi.” She nudges her nose into his clavicle. “Hi.”

He sets the files aside, and bends down around her. “You okay?”

“I’m really good.” Her voice wobbles, a bit, but that doesn’t make it a lie. “I’m—I’m really, really good.”

Matt breathes, the careful, deep way he does when he’s sorting out scents and stories. “You went to see Jen today.”

“Mm.” She’s cried too much already for her eyes to justifiably sting, but she still sniffs a little. “She, um. I told her a lot. And it was—good.”

“What kind of good?”

“She said she’s proud,” Darcy says, “of me,” and Matt dips his head and puts his mouth to her ear and sighs, tracing a curling pattern over one of the sharp ridges of her vertebra. “She said she was proud.”

“Really?”

“Mm.” She wants to tuck her nose into the crook of his neck and breathe forever, but she can’t. “I—we can talk about it later, but I told her who I am and—and about Eli and all she said was that she was proud of me, Matt.”

“If she hadn’t I would have had to talk to her.”

Darcy chokes a little. “Don’t get tomcatty. Both of you get so possessive.”

Matt hums into her hair, and doesn't deny it. “What else did she say?”

“I thought she’d be angrier, or—or ask more questions, I don’t know, just—” She shakes her head, and pulls back, bracing her fingers to his hips. “I know you didn’t want me to tell her, and I didn’t say anything about you, but—” 

“Hey, no.” Matt rests his thumb to her cheek. “No, that’s—it’s okay. I’m—I told you, I’m not comfortable with so many people knowing, but—I don’t know. I’m—trying.” He’s quiet, for a moment. “Kate said something when we were fighting, about how I don’t—trust people very easily. And I’m still uncomfortable putting people in danger with this, but I—I trust Jen not to give it away.”

“Because it’s Jen,” Darcy says, and Matt nods, because there’s not any other way to explain it, really. _Because it’s Jen._ Because she’s pretty sure Jen would die before blowing her cover, and that she, Darcy, would die before anyone put their hands on her sister. _Because it’s Jen._ “She said she’d suspected. For a long time.”

“About Lilith?”

“Mm.” She rests her head to his shoulder again. “I don’t know if she suspects you of anything. She didn’t say. She might ask you, I don’t know. But she was already in danger before Lilith ever happened, and knowing for sure means she can protect herself.”

“I know.”

Darcy listens to his heart, and breathes.

“We have bigger problems at the moment,” Matt says, and when she lifts her head to look at him, his lips are set into a thin line. “Karen didn’t text you?”

“No, what happened?”

“Brett pulled her aside when she was leaving the hospital, told her to tell you that they found a smiler.” Matt presses his fingers harder into her ribs, tucks his nose into her hair and breathes. “Do you know what that means?”

 _Smiling Finn._ “Means the Irish are finally back on the move,” she says, and puts her lips to the hollow of his throat, leaves them there. “I should go talk to him. He’ll throw a fit that he even had to tell Karen that much, he said like a million times how he doesn’t want anyone to know he’s feeding me information to feed to—well, me.”

“Do you mind if I come with you?” He actually sounds hesitant, for once, like he’s not sure he’d be welcome. “I need to get files for Jacinto. And for Frank, come to think of it. I’m wondering if there’ll be some evidence in the police files that Reyes managed to smother in the DA’s copies.”

“It’s possible.” She’s just not sure leaving Foggy and Karen alone again with the Punisher case is the best idea ever. “You talk to Foggy?”

“Not yet. I was waiting for you.” Matt sketches his thumbnail over the small of her back. “If you don’t want me to—”

“Don’t be stupid,” she says, fondly, and kisses him. She shouldn’t really—it’s the office, there are rules, but whatever, he’s being awkward and shy and sweet, they've never been all that great at paying attention to the office professionalism thing anyway, and she can’t not, right now. Besides, the blinds are closed in their office, so it’s not like Karen and Foggy would be able to tell. There’s a smudge of lipstick on his mouth when she drops back onto her heels again. Darcy swipes at it with her thumb. “I don’t think you’ll be able to bully your way into my conversation with Brett, he’s twitchy enough about this as it is, but, y’know. Not like you won’t be able to hear it. Should still ask Foggy, though. He didn’t want to take on Frank in the first place, we can’t keep abandoning him to do the work for the case because something else comes up.”

Matt doesn’t say anything, just heaves a huge sigh and hides in her hair again. “Father Lantom said something like—if we keep burning the candle at both ends there isn’t going to be any candle left anymore.”

“It’s cute that he thinks only two parts of the candle are burning,” Darcy says, and Matt snorts and smiles against her temple. “Like—I think of it like someone’s taken a knife to the wax and pulled out bits of wick and set fire to it all over. Bonus points if it’s a candle shaped like a baton, though I’m not sure other people wouldn’t mistake that for a dildo, if I’m gonna be honest—”

“You’re weird.” He kisses her ear again, and then her cheek, and fuck office professionalism if he’s laughing like Kermit for the first time in _ages,_ because this on top of this morning, on top of telling Jen, on top of cutting so much stress out of herself all at once? It’s making her giddy. “Why the hell are you so weird, you’re ridiculous—”

“’swhy you love me,” she says, and she’s still smiling when Matt cups a hand to her cheek and kisses her mouth, catching her laugh before it can get too loud. “Don’t lie and say it isn’t true. I’m relentlessly quirky. I’m a goddamn ball of charming eccentricity.”

“You’re a ball of something, all right.”

“Don’t be snide.”

“But I went to school for that,” he says, and starts laughing again when she nips at his lip. “Quit, stop making me laugh when we have to go ask about a murder.”

“But you’re cute when you laugh,” she says, and his ears actually turn pink under his hair. “You’re cute and it makes me happy and you don’t do it often enough, so I’ll keep on being weird, thank you.”

Matt hums, and kisses her again, lingering, fingertips settling just beneath her chin, palm braced over her throat. “I love you.”

“I know.”

“Thanks, Leia,” he says, and she grins and presses her lips to the point of his chin. “If Foggy wants one of us to stay, I will. Brett wanted to talk to you, not to me.”

“Because I’m his mysterious link to the land of vigilantes and awkwardly dead Irishmen.” Darcy pets the line of his jaw. “I want you to come.”

Another hum. “Foggy’s been talking about the police station all day, he’ll probably tag along too.”

“Hey, if Karen joins up, we can make a party of it,” she says. “Team Purgatory, onward ho.”

Matt lifts her hand to his lips before stepping away to a more socially acceptable distance and leading them out of the office. 

It turns out both Foggy and Karen have shopping lists for files they’ve been meaning to con out of Brett. “Not that I don’t trust Reyes gave us the right files,” Foggy says, and kicks Satan’s Photocopier in a way that makes it cough instead of whine. “But I really think she conveniently forgot to give us some of the crime scene photographs. Karen, what do you need?”

“I gave you the list,” Karen says, not looking up from her file. It’s basically laden to the edges with orange highlighter. “It’s on your desk, right hand side, on top of the—”

“Warehouse files,” Foggy says, and disappears back into his office. Karen peeks at them through her hair, and goes back to highlighting.

“Can you lock the door when you leave? I’m probably gonna just sit and go over these for a while longer.”

“Yeah, sure.” Darcy knocks her hip into Karen’s shoulder. “You want anything else? New eyeballs?”

“Christ, yes, please.” Karen wipes at her face. “Ibuprofen if you have it.”

“Check in my desk, there should be some somewhere.” She rocks into Karen’s shoulder again, squeezes her with one arm, and steps away. “We’re walking. Shouldn’t be more than an hour.”

“Cool.”

“Found it,” Foggy says, and reemerges from his office. His hair’s frizzing out. “Karen, are you—”

“Staying.” She fixes her eyes back on the papers again. Foggy looks at Matt, and lifts both eyebrows. Matt just shrugs. _Boys._ They used to be better at feelings than this. “See you in an hour.”

“Ibuprofen’s in my desk,” Darcy says again, and puts her elbow out for Matt to take. “Lemme know if Jen says anything, okay?”

Karen jerks her head up then, and blinks at her. Her ears turn pink. “Oh. Right. Yeah.”

Foggy waits until they’re out the door and down the hall, at least, before he says, “Is Karen okay?”

“Karen’s tired,” Darcy says. “You could ask her yourself, y’know.”

“She’s been biting, lately.”

“Like I said, she’s tired.” Matt curls his fingers into her arm, and says nothing. “Foggy, I know you’re not a big fan of Frank, and I know you didn’t want to do this, but maybe just like—tone down the commentary, okay? It matters to Karen.”

“I don’t get why.” He holds the door out onto the street. “Karen’s—Karen’s _Karen_ , you’d think after everything that happened with Fisk she’d hate this guy, not get—I don’t even know. Protective.”

Darcy bites her tongue. “She has her reasons, okay?”

Foggy’s eyebrows knit. “This is what you guys were talking about in the dark last night, isn’t it?”

“I can’t talk about it, okay, just—quit with the comments.”

“Can’t talk about it or won’t talk about it?”

“Can’t. For a lot of reasons. Leave it be for a while or she’s going to get pissed and that’ll be a huge problem for everyone.”

And the eyebrows zap even closer together, holy shit. “Does she have like—a thing for him, or something?”

“No, Foggy, Christ. Karen doesn’t have a _thing_ for Frank Castle, will you let it be?”

“I’m not saying it’s a problem if she does, aside from how, y’know, it’s a _huge problem_ , because professionalism, and ethics, and _sanity_ —”

“She doesn’t have a thing for Frank, all right?”

“Matt, c’mon—you’re the one with super-senses, does Karen have a crush on Castle, or like—vice versa, because she’s the _only_ one he talks to outside of you, Darcy, and we all know why he talks to you—”

Matt coughs. “Leave me out of this one, all right?”

Foggy’s mouth goes a bit grey around the edges. “Not really the answer I’m looking for here, bud.”

“I just don’t think it’s a good thing to necessarily be discussing on the sidewalk when there have already been like three reporters stalking us this week,” says Matt. “As an FYI.”

That, at least, makes Foggy shut his trap. It’s also not an answer, which absolutely none of them miss, but that’s a whole different animal. _Karen and Frank?_ Her first thought is _no, of course not, his family just died_ , and Karen’s not stupid, Frank’s a client and a tragedy and she wouldn’t ever do or say anything, not Karen, but then she thinks of black ice, and gasoline, and matches about to light, and maybe it’s not all that insane, after all.

_Ain’t that a plate of shit on toast._

Now that Brett’s a detective, and not a sergeant, they have to stop and wait in front of the sergeant’s desk for Brett to be summoned from the depths of the precinct. The new sergeant—a young black woman with amazing hair and a badge that reads _Knight_ on her smartly pressed uniform—settles back into her paperwork, humming under her breath with a purple pen flickering between her fingers. Matt presses two fingers into the soft space beneath her elbow, though, in a warning. _This one could probably break Foggy’s spine._ And yeah, there’s something in how she stands that reads _I can kick your ass and pick my teeth with your bones_ , even with her head bobbing back and forth to the rhythm of a song they can’t hear.  

Brett stops dead when he sees Matt and Foggy, and gives her an absolutely filthy look in the instant before Foggy realizes he’s there. _Sorry, dude._ “Files,” she says. “We came to get files. You said you had photos or something for me?”

“Yeah.” He cuts Knight a look. “Beat them up if you want, I don’t care.”

“C’mon, you care,” Foggy says. “We’re totally your favorite attorneys, Brett, don’t lie to me.”

“If I did have a list of favorite sharks, which I don’t, you’d be at the bottom. In the negatives. Tossed down past the abyssopelagic. No other option.” He opens the gate. “Knight, give them what they want so they go away, would you?”

“So like feeding pigeons,” Knight says.

“Sure, like feeding pigeons.”

“I take offense to that remark,” says Foggy.

“Yeah,” Matt says, and fights to keep his lips from twitching. “I figured you’d go with vultures, Brett.”

“Fuck off,” Brett says, and waves her through the gate. “C’mon, Lewis, this way.”

“Why does she get special treatment?”

“Because she doesn’t give my mother shit she doesn’t need.” The hinges creak. “You know the way.”

All the interview rooms are full. Darcy waves to one of the ADAs as she passes—Kirsten’s actually great, and it’s kind of sad that she barely ever gets a chance to talk to the woman—and drops down into the chair next to Brett’s desk. He’s in the back, kind of up against the wall, and that means that nobody can cross around behind her to see what she’s looking at. It’s probably the only reason they’re not in records, right now.

“Could’ve texted me,” Darcy says, before he can open his mouth. “You didn’t have to tell Karen. Which, by the way, back off on the judgy face with her visiting our client, it helps no one.”

“Whatever.”

“You’re the one that’s twitchy about secrecy.”

“Thus no phone records.” Brett taps a file with his forefinger before booting his computer back up. “That’s what you should look at. Didn’t want traces of me telling you any of this on something you could get a warrant for.”

“So call me. We could just say we argued about kimchi.”

A scoff. “You think you’re cute.”

“You’re in a mood.” Darcy snags the file off the top of the desk, and settles in. “You allowed to show me this thing?”

“Jesus, Lewis, no, you wanna say it again so the captain comes over here and tears me a new asshole?” 

She takes the hint, and shuts up. The file’s masked anyway, marked with— _what the hell, is this Maxwell’s assault file_? “You did your homework.”

“Yeah, well, it works.” He shimmies his mouse. “Since when do you and McDuffie wave at each other?”

“Since we bonded over the bad coffee and went on to kick respective ass in our side-by-side courtrooms? C’mon, Brettenstein, I know everyone, you know that.” 

“Yeah, and it’s a pain in the ass for me, just—look at the file.” Brett angles a look at her. “I know you’ve been staring at Punisher scenes twenty-four-seven, but be careful. It’s—brutal.”

“More brutal than getting hands blown off with shotguns?”

“Don’t bite my head off, Lewis.”

“I can’t believe I slept with you,” Darcy says, sourly. “I’m a big girl, Mahoney, I don’t need you to hold my hand about this.”

“Just saying. Made me uncomfortable. Dunno what it’s gonna do to you.”

“Now you’re just cursing it.” She hooks her ankles together under her chair. “What is it, Satanic sacrifice?” And that’s—actually, that’s a bad thought, because there are people who literally call themselves Devil Worshippers and Lilith’s Whores and Lamia, that’s a really, really bad thought—“Please tell me the Daredevil fanclub didn’t end up killing someone.”

“Not exactly.”

The file’s red. Darcy fingers the edges, the tab with the false case number scrawled across it in black pen. The first page is part of a crime scene report, an empty office in a warehouse used by a throwaway shipping company, something that went out of business years ago. First officer at the scene, Dennis Preston. One body. “No coroner’s report?”

“He just dropped last night, Lewis, pathologist’s office isn’t nearly that fast.”

“A man?”

Brett clicks through his computer. “He’s been ID’d, at least. Jim O’Reardon.”

“One of the Irish?”

“He used to be.” He taps a few more keys. “Fairly high up in the Brannigans until he was outed as one of Fisk’s men. Nobody could find the evidence to make it stick, though, so he’s been on parole, walking for the past five months. Sticks to his own neighborhood, mostly, 47th and 10th to 49th and 10th. ‘s how we found him so fast, his PO reported he’d broken the limits of his parole and that someone should go pick him up, knock some sense back into him.”

“A slashed throat doesn’t jive with knocking some sense into him.”

“Jives with Finn though.”

“I still don’t see why—”

 _Oh_. That’s why. That’s—definitely a reason why. _Smiling Finn,_ and yeah, there’s a deep, gaping wound in Jim O’Reardon’s throat. She’s never understood the phrase _from ear to ear_ before now, but Christ, she’s surprised the man’s head is still attached to his body. Jim O’Reardon has dark hair, defensive wounds on his hands. It’s the wall above his head, though, that’s the thing that’s making her freeze.  Someone’s dipped their fingers into the blood pooling in his collarbone, and dabbed out two words _._

_DEVIL’S DUE._

“Jesus Christ,” Darcy says. She might need to be sick. “Jesus _Christ._ ”

 “Told you,” says Brett.

“What the fuck is this?”

“Your people know about this?”

“They don’t tell me this kind of shit.” True answer: _no we fucking did not holy Christ what the shitbrick_. She presses a hand over her mouth, gulps back a scream. “Jesus Christ.”

“Feel like Finn’s kind of pissed your boy dragged their chew toy away.” Brett stares hard at the screen of his computer. “That’s my first instinct, anyway.”

“You think he killed this guy because they took Castle?”

“Nah. Finn’s not that kind of killer. O’Reardon’s dead because he pissed him off somehow, not because of your friend. Just—it’s good theatre, and that’s one thing Finn’s always been good at, the theatre.”

 _Fucking hell._ She’s actually going to throw up. "Shit."

He taps the photograph. “This right here, ‘swhy I didn’t want you involved. This is the kind of shit Brannigan does. Bodies turn up on flimsy excuses. It’s a miracle this bastard still has his molars. And all his fingers.”

“Jesus Christ.” She’s a broken record. “Jesus Christ.”

“You need air?”

 _I need to not scream or vomit or cry in the middle of the precinct._ “Yeah, I’m—I’ll talk to my friends.”

“Tell them to be careful,” Brett says. He taps the photo again. “Dunno how much you know about gangs, Lewis, but where I come from? This shit is a declaration of war.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Link to the mix!
> 
> http://8tracks.com/shuofthewind/the-source-of-darkness
> 
> Also, an Elektra mix that I'm proud of here, but that's just me shamelessly plugging:
> 
> http://8tracks.com/shuofthewind/to-the-edge-and-past-it


	14. The Red Brick Road

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks for translation, missingending! 
> 
> Sorry for the wait; I took a two week break, and then I was moving, and then dealing with moving and the mental health issues that cropped up with moving, and then figuring out some other things, but now I am settled and still on break so I should be able to get another chapter out within three weeks. 
> 
> /hits play on Deadpool rap and moonwalks away, waggling fingers/
> 
> Content warnings for this one: discussion of murder, imagery of gun violence and murder, mentions of drugs, gaslighting, discussion of rape and rape recovery, violence, blood, alcohol, implications of sex work (not a trigger but I know some people get weird about sex work), Elektra not knowing how to manage human emotion because brainwashing, and General Bonding.

“Are you _insane_?”

She could snap his stupid neck. No—she wants to shoot him. She wants to take her pistol and aim and feel the recoil, watch the back of his skull burst out the way Francis’s had so long ago. _Stupid, reckless, hotheaded idiot, I would cut your hands off if I could, tear your teeth out, how could this help us, how could this do anything but get attention we don’t need, you arrogant, prideful, puffed-up moron._ On the other end, Brannigan lets out a long, exasperated sigh.

“Could ask you the same question.”

“I’m not the one slitting the throats of my own men to wave a red flag in front of a bull!”

“Calm down, woman.”

“Don’t you dare patronize me, Finn Brannigan,” she says. “Don’t you _dare._ I’m not one of your men, I’m not one of your dealers or one of your escorts or your bloody fucking toys. Act like I am  again, and you’ll be the one to have his throat slit.”

“M’dear Miss Manfredi, here when I thought we were actually friends.”

“Friendship doesn’t preclude a garrote.” Maya yesterday, and now this— _I wish you were here, my love._ She can handle it, _will_ handle it, Brannigan is no worse than the board of the last art gallery she’d managed before Scene Contempo (albeit with slightly more violent tendencies than a vicious game of racketball) but— _I miss you, Wilson._ “What in God’s name do you think you’re doing?” 

“Cleaning shop,” he says, all air. “I may be stuck in the basement of a bloody fecking crackhouse, but I’m not an invalid. Whatever rot Fisk left behind in my family needs weeding out. O’Reardon was just the first one to come out of the woodwork.”

“And the message to the Devil, I suppose that was—I don’t know, a lark. A joke. Something that won’t bring either Lilith or Daredevil crashing down on your  head.”

His laughter’s crooning. She wants to rip out his tongue. “You’re not scared of ‘em, are you, Silvia?”

 _No._ This isn’t even close to fear, this cold burning in her throat. This is loathing, pure and simple. “They took down Wilson Fisk,” she says, and keeps her voice hard to hide the ache. “Within six months of that, my father disappeared after tangling with Lilith and one of her bitch friends. I’d say it’s more healthy wariness than actual fright.”

“Two idiots in tactical gear can’t do much of anything.”

“One idiot in tactical gear nearly destroyed your entire organization before the other two dragged him away kicking and screaming,” Vanessa snaps. “Don’t forget that, _Mr. Brannigan_.”

He hisses out between his teeth. “He had actual weaponry, not children’s toys.”

“And they still took him down.”

“Castle will get his comeuppance.”

“Not until your men are in place and we have the manpower to back up the challenge, for God’s sake, Finn.” Vanessa rubs at her eyes. “You’re not a stupid man. Quit acting like it.”

The silence rattles over the line. “You speak to me like that again,” he says, “and you’ll dislike the consequences, Miss Manfredi.”

“You owe me your life, Finn Brannigan,” she says, just as soft. “Don’t test me. Get your idiotic temper under control. I’ve had enough of watching men ruin perfectly good enterprises over a show of teeth.”

Vanessa hangs up before he can reply. It’s probably going to get her hell, later—Finn Brannigan isn’t the sort of man she can hang up on without consequences—but she does it, and when he calls back she rejects it. She sends Maya a text. _I thought you were there to keep an eye on him, not let him pick fights._ Marked as read, no reply, and she has a migraine now as well as an empty stomach.

It’s only after she’s gone to the sideboard, poured herself a drink and downed half of it, that she lets herself think: _I loathe this._ This had been the life she’d left behind her, joining the art world. She’d grown up surrounded by men like Finn Brannigan, learned it at her father’s knee, her and her brother Joseph, and now Joseph is in Sicily on pain of death, her father’s vanished, and she’s taken on her old name and plunged right back into the muck she’d fought so desperate to get free of, all for the new world she’d caught a glimpse of a year ago, in Hell’s Kitchen on fire and Wilson’s reflection in the windowpane.

She thinks her father would have hated Wilson. Wilson had been different than the men Silvio had known, his goals had been different, settled not in greed or violence but in—in cleansing, in ridding the world of the men her father had played like harpsichords. _A new world, free of the pestilence of the old._ Free of men like Brannigan, like her father. She’ll gladly drench herself in filth for that. 

_If he does anything else tell me,_ she swypes out, and again, it’s marked as _read_ with no response. Maya’s ignoring her. Vanessa turns off the screen, leans back in her chair and sighs.

To rebuild a city, one has to burn down the shell. Get Finn’s men in place, usurp him. Take control of the Kitchen Irish. She’d chosen the Irish because there are still enough men loyal to Wilson on the inside that transferring power would be less of a battle than a hiccup or three. _Unless Brannigan keeps killing them to send a message._ It would all be so much easier if she could just be in New York, be on the ground, get things done herself, not languish here in this ridiculous house with the neighbors peering in through the gaps in the fence at her scarf and her bare feet—

The phone buzzes again. _Unknown number._ Vanessa hits speaker. “This is Silvia.”

“Miss Vanessa.”

“Mr. Donovan,” she says, and her heart skips. _Benjamin Donovan, attorney._ “How is he?”

“Surviving, Miss Vanessa, as always.” There’s the long blare of a car horn. “Apologies for the lack of correspondence the past few weeks. I had a number of tasks to complete in regards to matters here.”

“No, it’s no problem, I’ve been—busy.”

“It was still unconscionably rude of me.” He coughs. “Things here have—improved. If only fractionally. He spends much of his time alone. There are those here who are loyal to him, who protect him. You have little to fear.”

“That doesn’t help me, Mr. Donovan, but thank you.” She breathes, for a moment. Her lungs burn and stretch and ache. “If there’s anything I can do on this end—”

“You must stay out of sight, Miss Vanessa, at least until we have the ability to keep the police off. At the moment, New York is the most dangerous place on the planet for you.”

“I’m aware of that, but without personal attention there are only so many things I can manage without the entirety of it going wrong.”

“You’ve already done a great deal.”

“I wish to do more,” she says. “I’m not the first woman in my family to have worn a mask, Mr. Donovan. I probably won’t be the last. If I must change my face and name, I will. For the sake of the enterprise. I am not an invalid to be cooped up in one house for months at a time, and I am not incompetent.”

“He does not believe you to be.”

“That I know.” Wilson would be the last man on the planet to think anything like that of her. “And I understand the risks of revealing myself, but things are—delicate. If I do not act soon, I may not have a chance to act at all.”

He muses over that. “How is Maya?”

“Wavering,” says Vanessa. “Thus the concern.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

“I’m handling it, Mr. Donovan, but thank you. Is there any word from Davos?”

“No, ma’am. Did you expect there to be?”

“No, but perhaps it’s wishful thinking.” She could use another ally, right about now. If Maya is fraying at the seams, there’s only so much time left. _James, James, why on earth were you stupid enough to get yourself shot?_ The steely efficiency of James Wesley would be a godsend right now. Christian tries, but he lacks the creativity necessary for a proper lieutenant. And she’d hoped Maya would be able to fill the role, but— _be patient. She’s young and confused._ Vanessa sighs. “I’m afraid I have a migraine.”

“Mr. Fisk was concerned that Maya hasn’t yet come out to visit him in Ryker’s.” Donovan’s voice is the kind of delicate that means _treading around a mine._ “If there’s any message she would like to give him—”

“I doubt it.” She rubs at her eyes. “Maya is becoming a problem.”

“How so?”

“Naïveté.” And something more than that, but there’s no way to know that for sure without actively snooping. Which she can do. _If you are lying to me, Maya, my darling, I will find out._ “I’ll handle it. She knows where her loyalties lie. Wilson knows that better than anyone.”

“If you could get her to visit him, it might do wonders for his mood and her naïveté.”

That it would. If she could get Maya to actually agree. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“He wished for me to tell you that he misses you, quite dearly.”

She can’t breathe, for a second. Vanessa finds a damp spot on her cheek, wipes it away.

“Is there anything you would like me to say to him for you?” says Donovan.

_I love you more than anything. I miss you. I wish you were here. I hate them for doing this to us and they’ll pay for it. I’m frustrated and angry and lonely and terrified, because the Hand are coming, and if they arrive before we’re ready I don’t know how we’re going to handle it. I’m worried your daughter might betray you. I want to go back home, to the penthouse with the high windows and omelets in the morning. Why can’t we just go home?_

“He knows all of it,” Vanessa says. “Let me know how things are going with the cases, please.”

“Of course, Miss Vanessa.” Pause. “I may be able to get him a burner phone. If all goes well with the current venture.”

 _God, please, please let me talk to him._ “Tell me if it works. But be very careful, if he’s caught—”

“He owns a third of Ryker’s already, Miss Vanessa,” says Donovan, wry. “And if his current venture succeeds, he will own all of it. There’s no reason to fear. You should take care. You don’t sound well.”

“I’m tired, that’s all.” And her migraine is killing her slowly. “I’ll speak to you soon, Mr. Donovan.”

“Yes, ma’am,” says Donovan.

She’s the one to hang up the phone. Vanessa puts it to her lips for a moment, thinking. It’s only after that she retires to her room, and puts a pillow over her head. Maybe if she can’t see the light anymore, it won’t hurt so much.

.

.

.

Darcy doesn’t sleep that night.

It’s probably a bad idea, considering everything else that’s going on. But come on, dead bodies and writing on the wall—that’s not something they can leave be. It’s not. Not with _devil’s due_ and Finn Brannigan and Frank lying in a hospital bed with blood in his asphalt eyes. Christ, if he heard about this, if he knew about this, then— _shit._ He’d be out of the hospital in a Peloponnesian minute, and that would be really fucking terrible for everyone concerned. _The last thing we need right now is for the Punisher to go back on the hunt, or try to break out, or any of it._

“You realize this is like—an obvious trap, right,” Foggy says, when they get back to the office and Darcy finally goes over all of it. Matt’s settled in one of the chairs, hand curled up into a fist against his mouth. Karen folds her arms tight across her stomach, and leans against the desk with her head tipped forward, hiding behind her hair. “This is definitely—definitely a scary-ass motherfucker trying to draw one or both or all of you out so he can kill you, and it’s really not a good idea to hook up. You know that, right?”

“If he keeps on killing people Frank will hear about it,” Matt says into his knuckles. “And if Frank hears about it there’ll be problems.”

“Like what?” Karen says, in a voice like saran wrap. “Like he knows that the guy who killed his family is still out there and trying to get our attention?”

“Like he might try to break out of custody and that’s the last thing that needs to happen before a court case, Karen, Jesus,” says Foggy. He rubs his hands over his face. “You have to admit that’d be kind of a bad thing.”

“No, I know.” Karen bites her lip, lets her hair fall forward again. “I just don’t know that keeping it from him is a good idea.”

“Telling him isn’t a good idea either.”

“I know, Foggy. But I don’t want to lie to him, either, he’s been lied to enough.”

“I’m not saying to lie to him, just—just stay away for a few days until we can figure out what we can do about it.” She jams her glasses hard into the bridge of her nose, trying to snap her brain back into thought. “Work with Jen, help Ben with the background, okay, just—don’t go see him until we have a better idea of what Brannigan’s doing and if we can get him into custody.”

Karen opens her mouth, shuts it again. “I don’t—”

“Karen,” Matt says, “please, just—a few days.”

She goes quiet. The moment hangs on a spider’s web. Then—“Fine,” she says. “Three days.”

Three days. _No sleep for you, girlie-girl._ “Three days works,” Darcy says, and Foggy turns to stare hard at the window. “Thank you, Kare.”

“Sure,” says Karen, and snags the leash off the table. “Santino called me earlier about a friend, I’m gonna—I’ll be back in two hours.”

“Three days goes for the pair of you, as well,” Foggy says, as soon as Karen’s out the door. “We can’t—we _cannot fuck this up_. And the only reason I’m like…not having a complete meltdown right now about the looks on your faces, because you have the fuckin’—the _I need to save the world_ look, yeah, that one, right there—is because if Brannigan stays out, it could fuck with this case, and we _cannot_ let anything fuck with this case. So just—deal with it and come back. As fast as possible.” He looks hard at Matt, and then adds, “We need to keep it together, okay? There can’t be any mistakes.”

He shuts the door of his office before Darcy can think of anything to say.

And yet there’s nothing. Not that night, and not the next. Not just no trail, but _nothing_. No Irish to be found anywhere. Like when Owlsley had been taken by Gao, she thinks. Like when Fisk had gone to ground. Nothing, and no one, and the streets are too quiet. All of the old Irish haunts? They’re empty, now, thanks to Frank, and none of the new options have a whisper of activity left to them. There’s nothing to find, and at the end of the second night she’s tempted to seize the nearest empty beer bottle and smash it to pieces against the wall.

Kate, at least, is chipper about the whole thing. Kate’s just chipper to be out of Clint’s apartment, Darcy thinks. She’s _gleeful_ , and that means she’s on full snark power, and it makes things easier, because at least corralling Kate into something not resembling a child hopped up on sugar and caffeine is distracting enough to keep her from having a full-on panic attack about the whole thing.

“Theory twenty-three,” Kate says, at about two AM on the second night. “All Irishmen have the ability to become undetectable at will. Even from superpowered noses.”

“Not possible.” Matt crouches on the edge of the fire escape, tips his head to listen to the street, and then turns to face Kate on the opposite rooftop, shaking his head. Darcy swings her legs over the railing, drops down to the next level. “There’d be some traces left.”

“You don’t know everything about the world, Aramis, don’t tell me what’s impossible.”

“Is he Aramis or is he Athos?”

“He’s their freakish lovechild. Or their portmanteau. Athamis.”

“Can we focus, please?”

Out of the corner of her eye, Darcy can see her shift, slide her arrow back into the quiver on her back. She squats like a stork, yanks her hair up out of her eyes and ties it off. _Good way to get snagged, Katie, be careful with those ponytails._ “Whatever, Athamis. Plus, you’re as Irish as they are, you might be in on the whole thing.”

“If I could turn undetectable at will, we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” Matt says. “It’s not possible to completely erase all evidence of yourself and still exist. Just scientifically.”

“You never know. A lot of people would call you impossible, and you know it. A lot of people would call a lot of us impossible, and yet here we are.”

“You’re philosophical tonight.” Darcy drops the last ten feet to the ground, and grits her teeth to pretend her knees aren’t shaking like maracas at the landing. “What’s the word up there?”

“Quiet. Well, quiet for the city.” Kate sucks her teeth. “You don’t have time tomorrow, do you? I want to talk to you about something.”

“I have like seven straight hours of work and then probably another seven hours of meetings for other cases and then maybe ten minutes to sleep, but I can probably figure something out.”

“You sure you want to be talking about this right now?” says Matt. Matt, not Daredevil, judging by the exasperation. “Considering.”

“Nobody’s listening, man.” Up on the rooftop, Kate settles, and swings one foot over the edge. Nausea twists up in Darcy’s stomach, and dies a terrible, bloody, bowel-curling death. “Unless you know someone else with super-hearing.”

“I don’t like how quiet it’s been.”

“Neither do I, but I’m just saying, no one’s on these comms but us. That I’m sure of.”

“I can try to figure out time if you want, but I’ll probably be braindead, especially once jury selection starts next week.” Darcy kicks a beer can, and steps out of Matt’s way as he drops. “What’d you want to talk about?”

“Nothing,” says Kate.

“You want to talk about nothing? The endless void?” Darcy drops her voice. “You are a daughter of the void, as are we all.”

“Including Daredevil,” says Kate, and Matt makes a noise that could be a snort if it weren’t so muffled under the mask. “It’s not nothing, obviously, but like—it’s not a huge deal, especially not looking at everything else going on right now. Just a thing.”

“Is this a thing about the yakuza or a thing about nasty tenants or a thing about hawks?” 

“None of them.” She pauses. “Well, hawks, sort of, but none of them, really.”

“I’m not listening to this,” says Matt.

“I’m going to tell all the Avengers that Daredevil can’t handle intragang gossip and they’ll laugh at you and then we’ll finally be even for you scaring off the Kobayashi and the Matsuhara way back when.” Kate takes a deep breath. “Hold on to your hats, guys, but I think Spider-Man has a crush on me.”

Out of all the things that have happened lately, that is—not what Darcy expected. “Wait, Spider-Man? Black and red costume? Sassy? Keeps poking his nose into our drug dealer busts?”

“He only did that once,” says Kate. “He felt bad as soon as Daredevil yelled at him.”

“Yeah, I’d feel bad if Daredevil yelled at me, too,” says Darcy, and Matt sidles along to knock hard into her shoulder. She bites her lip to keep from grinning. “How’d you figure that?”

“We’re not all stuck with the emotional cognizance of developmentally stunted dingbats,” says Kate. “No offense.”

“That seemed offensive,” says Matt. “Just a little.”

“Who says I was talking about you?”

“I will put you both in time out,” Darcy says, and bumps the point of her elbow into Matt’s ribs. When he turns deeper into the alley, stalking the way he always does in the suit, she follows without asking why. “Why do you think Spider-Man has a crush on you? Did he leave a note on the GWB or something? _Dear Hawkeye, meet me at Marino’s at 6pm Friday, we’ll go dutch?_ ”

“We’ve been talking lately.”

“How have you been talking to Spider-Man?”

“Internet,” Kate says. “We’re talking about starting a superhero only chatroom or something. Maybe a vigilante dating site. We could call it _Masks_ and you could mark on your profile if you’re willing to bang someone in their costume or not. Identities not required for sexytimes, check yes or no.”

“Not funny, Hawkeye.”

“Totally funny. But yeah, it doesn’t—really matter how we’ve been talking, lately. He’s not gonna turn me over. I just—” She stops. “Actually, Devil, you’d be the expert on this one, considering—”

“Considering how much I don’t want to get involved?”  

“Considering you currently hold the record for Chief of Pining within Team Purgatory, I figure, y’know. You might have some input.”

 _Chief of Pining._ Darcy smacks into his shoulder with hers. “Chief, huh?”

He leans back into her. “Because this is something to discuss while hunting for Irish mobsters.”

“Seriously, take the stick out of your butt for like twenty seconds, Shy Guy,” says Kate, and Darcy bites her tongue to keep from laughing. “This is an actual question, okay? I think Spider-Man has a crush on me and I don’t know what to do about it.” 

“Have you tried showing him your boobs?” Darcy says. “It works.”

“I’m pretty sure I don’t want to flash Spider-Man my boobs. He might crash into a building.”

“I’m turning off my comm,” says Matt.

“Like that’ll stop you hearing this, Batman.”

“Bats—”

“—aren’t blind, I know, Bruce.”

Matt keeps his mouth shut. There’s not really any way he can respond to that, after all.

“I mean, I guess the question is do you want him to have a crush on you, or no.” Darcy shrugs. “And if he does do you want to do anything about it, or do you want it to like…disappear.”

“I don’t know what I want, that’s the problem.” There’s a little grunt. Darcy darts a look up at the building where Kate was, and finds nothing, no silhouette. “I don’t—I don’t know. I don’t _want_ things to change right now. I’m good with what’s in my life at the moment, I’m—I like doing this, every night, and I like working with Hawkguy, and I like being what I am without something like…this. Complicating it.”

There’s someone arguing at the far end of the alley, out of sight. Darcy glances at Matt, tips her head, and he flares three fingers. _Three guys._ When he curls a hand up into a fist, drags sideways: _knife._ _Mugging_? she mouths, and he tips his head once. Darcy puts two fingers up to her helmet where the comm rests, and says, “Give us a sec, babe.”

“Nah, I see them,” says Kate. “Incoming fire in three, and two, and one—”

It’s been a while since there’s been a simple mugging to take care of. Kate’s arrow snags the guy with the knife through the back of the shirt, pins him to the wall. Someone hisses, long and low between their teeth—Matt, not a mugger, and it’s satisfaction, not fear, when he snags the second one to slam into the dumpster. Which leaves Darcy with the third guy, the one with the gun. She’s not good enough with the whip to snag it out of his hand and won’t be for a long time yet, but when the guy yanks the pistol out of the back of his pants it catches in the waistband  and it’s enough time for her to twist it out of his hand and drive him face first into the wall. He’s out like a light, which—what the fuck, usually they don’t go down this easily. _Too used to career criminals, girly-girl._ Darcy looks down at him for a moment, and clicks her tongue against her teeth. “That was like—sad panda levels of pathetic.”

The girl with the torn purse looks at her with a smeary face, with mascara-wet lashes.

“Go, darlin’,” Darcy says, and she bolts out of the alley. “You wanna bet she’ll call the police?”

“Nah, but we can make sure they don’t do it again.”

As if to make the point, the Devil upends his goon into the dumpster. 

“Anyway,” says Kate, once they’ve mopped up. “Things are complicated enough without, y’know. Spider-Man having a crush on me. Because it _is_ a thing. I’m not imagining it.”

“Not doubting that.” And she’s not, really, because if any of them could snag another costumed badass without batting an eyelash (and mainly through aiming arrows at his face) it would probably be Kate. “If you don’t want to, y’know, change anything about your life right now, then you don’t need to. If Spider-Man’s enough of a grown-up to get his ass thrown off the edge of a building, he can deal with you telling him no.”

“I don’t think he’d be weird about it, that’s not what I’m worried about, like—” Kate sucks her teeth. “I dunno. I don’t know that I want to tell him no because I want to tell him no, or if it’s that I want to tell him no because it’s—easier. Not to have a thing. Especially—I mean, it’s me.”

“Ah,” says Darcy.

“If you don’t want to then you don’t want to,” Matt says, abrupt. “End of discussion.”

“Aw,” says Kate, and she sounds genuinely touched, all amber warm and curly. “Thanks, Bats.”

Matt rolls a shoulder like a cat, and drags himself up onto the nearest fire escape one-handed.

“And this has to do with hawks how?” Darcy says. Her arms aren’t quite long enough to reach the fire escape even if she jumps, but she can at least catch Matt’s hand and heave herself up. _Yes. Thank you, daily exhaustion, you at least get me fucking awesome core muscles._ Somehow it’s never quite budged the roundness of her belly, but that’s just the way her body’s shaped, apparently. “Did Hawkguy have something to say about this?”

Kate’s silence echoes like a shattering plate.

“Hawkeye?”

“I dunno, man, feelings are hard. I think most people in our position like—avoid this for a reason. It’s way easier to think about saving the world or the Kitchen or whatever without dealing with squishy emotions on top of it.”

She definitely catches Matt turning his face to her at that one. Darcy tips her chin up at him, cocks her eyebrows behind her mask, and then says, “It works sometimes.”

“Don’t get sappy on me, Lilith.”

“Wasn’t planning on it.” She goes up the ladder, hand over hand. “Did Hawkguy say something, or—”

“Christ, you think _Hawkguy_ would say anything? The man’s a walking disaster. Even by the standards _we_ have, he’s a walking disaster, and I’m pretty sure that he doesn’t actually think about me outside of like…the weird chick who likes purple and occasionally drives him insane. No, I’m pretty sure this is just me being stupid, and I don’t even know if I have like—feelings or if there’s something else going on or if my whole brain has been like—fucked irrevocably by everything that happened last year—”

“Hawkeye—”

“Don’t talk to me about survivor mentalities right now, okay, I don’t want to hear about how—how everyone manages it differently or _whatever_. I know people handle it differently, and—and recover differently. None of it changes the fact that the only time I don’t feel like broken glass inside is when I’m out here doing shit with you guys.”

Oh. Blood leaks over her tongue. It’s only after that that Darcy feels the sting of her teeth, cutting into the inside of her lip. Matt knocks his elbow into hers when he passes her on the way to the next ladder.

“You’re all quiet and weird now,” Kate says, in a brittle voice. “This is why I don’t talk about it. I hate it when people get quiet and weird about it.”

“No, I’m not—sorry.” Darcy clears her throat. “If you have feelings, and they’re all twisted, then that’s fine. If you don’t have feelings and things are twisted because of what Goodman did, then that’s fine too. You’re not obligated to have feelings for anyone, Katie, or to return them.”

“I know.” She’s quiet for a little bit, though. “I just feel like a scumbag for knowing that, y’know. There’s a guy who likes me and he’s nice and everything but I don’t—actually know what I can do about it. I don’t even know if I like him or if I don’t, or if I’m even capable of it. I don’t know.”

“If you don’t,” Darcy says, and bites down on the bloody place inside her mouth to keep her voice from shaking, “there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s been a year. Nobody’s expecting you to pretend it never happened or—or be the same as you were before any of this. Or for you to go back to dating or to relationships before you’re ready. It’s okay if you’re never ready.”

“Mm.”

“You’re not a scumbag,” says Matt, and Darcy steals a look at him out of the corner of her eye. “You’re not obligated. Full stop. Anyone makes you feel like you are, they’ll deal with the rest of us.”

“Feels kind of weird hearing that from you, Señor Horny,” says Kate, but there’s a shaky smile in her voice, now, at least. “Super paternalistic of you.”

“We’re your friends, Hawkeye,” says Darcy. “Nobody should be making you feel like you need to feel anything at all. And if you don’t know, then you don’t know. We can break faces to make it clear for people.”

“You’d break an Avenger’s face?”

“Anyone’s face,” says Matt.

“Pretty much,” says Darcy.

“Aw,” says Kate again. “I might hug you guys when we meet up at the end of the block.”

“Not in costume.”

“Shut up, Dad.”

“Make me, Cassie Cain,” says Matt, and swings out of reach before Kate finishes her sputtering.   

They stay out for another two hours, and find a grand total of squat with a side of diddly-doo-dah before finally calling it a night. Kate does, in fact, hug them in costume—she bends into Darcy, says nothing but squishes her with all her bony strength, and leaves a smear of purple lipstick on the side of Matt’s helmet when she crushes him too, something that surprises Matt as much as it does Kate judging by the way his lips part when she draws away—and vanishes in the direction of Brooklyn and Bed-Stuy without another word. It’s only after they get home, and Darcy’s snagged her Lilith phone out of her bag (she’s added Jen’s burner phone, the one she uses to talk to her other, internationally wanted cousin, to the list of contacts) to text _home, no one’s hurt_ to Jen, Foggy, and Karen, that she says, “You wanna take Cobwebs or M*A*S*H?”

“Hah.” Matt locks the door. “The marksman or the kid who can pick up semi-trucks. Great selection.”

“Hey, there was face breakage promised.” Darcy drops down onto the couch, undoes the clasp to her helmet and rests it in her lap. “I think I’ll take Clint. If I offer to buy him coffee first he won’t expect me to snap his nose.”

“Yeah, leave me with the dangerous one.”

“Whatever, dude. Spider-Man’s a softie, I get the feeling. You could probably whack him in the back of the neck before he realized you were gonna do it, even if he _can_ be freakish fast sometimes.” She shuts her eyes. “I don’t like that we can’t find Brannigan.”

Matt dumps his helmet onto the counter, scuffs his sweaty hair up off his scalp. There’s a lot of clicking and clunking behind her, the snap of the clasps of his suit and the clatter of sticks against the kitchen counter. “You’d think he’d want us looking for him, a message like that.”

“Exactly.”

“Maybe he’s figured out there’s a downside to having us find him.” The downside, judging by the thing Matt’s whole face is doing right now, being _having his spine snapped in addition to all the shotgun bits still in his system._ “It’s possible.”

“Maybe.” She rolls just enough to look at him, barely getting a glimpse through her lashes. “Just seems really counterintuitive that he call us out with a dead fucking body and then keep his nose in the hole so we don’t actually, y’know, see him.”

“Someone could have told him to keep his head down.”

“And that’s even scarier, because that means there’s more than just Brannigan to worry about.” Darcy lets her eyes slide closed again. “We have to find him before Karen tells Frank that he’s killing again. If Frank hasn’t heard about it already.”

“At least if we don’t before she mentions it, we know that he probably won’t be able to track the son of a bitch down either.” The couch creaks and shifts and then Matt’s dropped down next to her, just in boxers. When she peeks, there’s a huge bruise over the back of his shoulder, from what, she can’t remember. _Oh, right. Hardcore parkour._ “Dammit.”

“Your shoulder okay?”

“Should be okay if I don’t ram it into anything for a few days.” He takes her mask from her, sets it aside, and nudges his fingers to her knee. “Don’t fall asleep in that, you’ll hurt yourself.”

“I thought the point of the suit was to keep me from getting hurt at all.”

Matt taps at her nose with his thumb. “Doesn’t mean you should be sleeping in it.”

“You honestly could dump me in the Hudson right now and I wouldn’t wake up enough to manage peeling this leather octopus off of my body.” Darcy tugs her gloves off, though. “You shower first, I’ll figure out the condom suit.”

“You sure you don’t want help?”

Darcy opens her mouth, shuts it. Opens it back up. “I mean, if you want to.”

Matt taps at her nose again, and then drags one of her feet up onto his knees, fumbling with the zipper of her boot. “You never found out anything about that woman from the catacombs?”

“Miss Ninja? No. Other than the fact that she’s like—insanely coordinated and gets faster the longer you fight her.” Darcy makes a noise that’s more animal than human when the shoe comes off, and drops her head back against the pillows. “ _Fucking_ hell my foot.”

Matt drags her other leg up by the ankle to get at the second boot. “She’s set herself up as his bodyguard. Pretty sure if we can find her, we can find wherever Brannigan’s hiding.”

“She was wearing a mask.” The second boot hits the floor with a clunk, and for a fleeting moment before sleepiness snakes around to bite her in the neck, she feels bad for Mr. and Mrs. Perez in 5A about the noise. Then, of course, there’s a warm hand curled around her toes, fingers pushing into sore spots, and she’s kind of distracted again. “Jesus Christ, you’re breaking me.”

“There are knots,” says Matt, in a voice that’s a shade too casual. “If you’re limping tomorrow people will ask questions.”

“What about you?”

“I didn’t wear heels all day and then go running in boots with even _higher_ heels.”

“Because you are a lucky asshole,” Darcy says, and shuts her eyes. “Christ, I’m sleepy.”

“It’s been a long few days.”

“You think we can find her if Brannigan’s gone to ground?”

Matt strokes his forefinger down the hollow of her ankle a few times. “If we’re not having luck finding any of the other Irish, we might be able to find a lady bodyguard. There aren’t as many as there are gangsters, if people see her, they’ll remember.”

“Maybe, but it’s kind of a longshot.”

“Mm.”

Darcy blinks at him, slowly. “Did you pick anything up from her that’ll give us someplace to start?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know how much of it will be accurate. My head was still ringing, I’m—not sure if what I picked up was mixed or not.”

“You remember?”

“I tried,” he says, and digs his thumb into the ball of her foot. Darcy whines a little, and jams her heel into his leg.

“Mother _fucker_.”

“How do you not have a broken toe yet?”

“Practice.” Darcy scratches the pillow when he finds another knot. “Quit showing off your skills-with-a-Z and tell me what you picked up from her.”

“I thought I was helping.”

“It’s not like I said _stop_.”

His mouth goes all crooked and cocky. Matt curls his other hand around her foot, too, and goes to work. “Shampoo,” he says. “Fairly standard herbal. Leather from her shoes, I think. Smoke, but not cigarette, it was more like something you’d find in a church.”

“Like St. Patrick’s?”

“Yeah, but not the same blend. I don’t know what it was. More herbal stuff.” Her toes curl when he finds another knot, and Matt presses his fingers to her ankle, just for a moment. “You’re going to have blisters.”

“I always have blisters.” She wraps one arm close around her stomach, the suit creaking against her skin. “What else?”

“Salt.” Now to the top of the foot, following the lines of her bones. “Vietnamese food, I think, I’m not sure, that’s mixed up. And—I don’t know. She moved strangely.”

“What do you mean?”

“She never jumped,” he says. “When the guns went off. She didn’t jump. Usually even if you’re expecting a gunshot, there’s a minute twitch in the muscles in a reaction. You—it’s like you tense up, even if it’s only for a second. She didn’t.”

Darcy blinks at him. “You think it could have been your head?”

“I don’t know, it’s possible. My ears were ringing enough that it could have been my imagination.”

She jams her heel into his leg again. “Could have fucking told me that.”

“I was okay.”

“You have an awful definition of okay.”

“I’m okay now,” he says. “You weren’t much better. I could hear your ankle creaking the whole time.”

 _Yeah, but I wasn’t shot in the head._ She can’t say it, though. ( _Bang_ and Matt falls and the world is gone and she can’t do that again, she can’t look at that again, not when things are finally getting better, goddammit _—_ ) “Any way she could have just trained herself out of reacting?”

“You usually can’t control muscle twitches like that on such a minor scale. It’s not like keeping yourself from flinching if someone goes to hit you, it’s like—” Matt presses hard into a knot with his thumb, and Darcy bites her tongue. “It would be roughly the equivalent of getting the hiccups and simultaneously keeping your diaphragm completely still.”

“So impossible, basically.”

“Mm.”

She is actually going to die if he keeps doing this to her feet. She’s not quite sure how yet, but she’s going to die. _But if he stops I’ll kill him, seriously, Jesus Christ._ “She could have been wearing earplugs.”

“And still spoke to you?”

“She can read lips maybe.”

“Interesting skill for a bodyguard.”

“Who knows, man, I’m fucking exhausted, I can’t think anymore.”

Matt strokes her ankle, absently. “It could be nothing. It was probably nothing, considering everything else I missed that night.”

“Or it could be the key to all of this, we can’t know until we find her and ask.”

“Mm,” says Matt again, and clenches his jaw to hide a yawn. “Who knows.”

“Angie, probably, she knows everything ever.” She pushes her foot into his knee. “You’re falling asleep, there, boyo.”

“Like you’re not,” he says, and pinches her ankle. “Don’t make me carry you.”

“You’d drop me, don’t even right now with the macho bullshit, you’re all noodly and sweaty.” She swings her legs off his lap. “Go shower. I’m going to be gross and not do that and try to pour myself into a horizontal position instead.”

“Noodly,” Matt says under his breath. “ _Noodly._ ”

“I’m noodly too,” she says. “Can’t help it. Hardcore parkour results in noodling.”

“You’re calling me _noodly_.”

Darcy stops, and stays very still. “Don’t.”

“I haven’t said or done anything.”

“Yet,” she says, and his mouth goes all crooked. Laughter bubbles up her throat. “I can see it in your fucking face, Matt, don’t you dare _._ ”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t you _dare_ ,” she says again, but Matt’s fast, damn him, even after hours and hours, and she’s not fighting, not really. She kind of clips him in the head a little bit when he locks an arm around her legs and heaves her up off the floor, but she doesn’t like—rear around and break his nose and put him on the ground, which is what would be fighting with literally anyone else. Darcy pinches her nails into his shoulders. She can’t stop laughing. “You gigantic asshole, put me _down_ —”

“I,” Matt says, “am not _noodly_.”

“Oh my god, you _child_ —”

“This is not the definition of a noodle.”

“You _nerd_ ,” Darcy says. “You are an enormous nerd and you’re ridiculous and you need to put me _down_ , you’re slaphappy and I’m going to hit the door frame or something—”

“I’m not going to let you hit the door frame—duck.”

She ducks, knocks her head to his hair. “If I say you’re not noodly, and you are in fact the least noodly person I know, will you put me down so I can take my pants off and go sleep?”

Matt loosens his grip just enough that she slides down, catches her around the hips instead, so her mouth is about even with the tip of his nose. Darcy scuffs the two together, because she can, and grins when his whole face scrunches up. “No, because you smell like suit and city and then we’d have to wash the sheets again.”

“Are you saying I smell nasty?”

“All I said was suit and city, you’re the one who pulled _nasty_ into it.”

“I hate you,” Darcy says, and tugs on his earlobe. “I spend all night helping you look for someone who doesn’t want to be found and I get all this sass and harassment from a noodle—hm.”

She’s pretty sure the nip of teeth in her lower lip is supposed to be some kind of _quit it_ , but it doesn’t really work that way anymore. Still, she stops arguing for a little bit.

 _It’s getting better,_ she thinks. Even with dead bodies and Brannigan and Frank, they’ve turned a corner, finally. Things are looking up.

.

.

.

_Devil’s due._

Maya shrugs deeper into her jacket, and hooks one ankle around the other, fingers curled against the brick wall behind her.

_Devil’s due._

She’d turned her phone off as soon as the second text had come in. _If he does anything else, tell me,_ and she’d felt so sick that she’d had to stumble into an alley and heave. Nothing had come up, but she’d rested there, palms against the brick, until her hands had stopped shaking. _If he does anything else, tell me,_ Vanessa had said, but she’s been standing across the street from the house for a good hour, and her feet won’t move. She can’t go back into that house, not into that awful place, the chemical stench of old crack and the bloody basement, red creeping over the floor. “One of Fisk’s men,” Shaun had said out of the corner of his mouth, absently peeling an apple with his flick knife as he’d watched O’Reardon scream. “Sending a message, really.”

“To who?”

“All of them,” Shaun had said. “All of Fisk’s traitors, they’ll hear about this, think twice about trying to sneak back into the family with their tails between their legs.”

 _If he does anything else, tell me,_ she’d said. _I thought you were there to keep an eye on him, not let him pick fights_ , she’d said. _I don’t think I can control him at all._ She’s never seen someone murdered before. She’s seen someone die, she’s seen her father die, but murder, like that, no. Brannigan had dealt the blow himself, stood up on one good leg and balanced and used a box cutter on O’Reardon’s throat. The look on O’Reardon’s face had been awful, mesmerizing and cold, the way his mouth had contorted with the scream and how the blood had smeared and sprayed. Not a drop of it had touched her, but she’d tasted it anyway, raw on her lips and on her tongue, old memories and stale tears. She’s here to make sure Brannigan survives until they no longer need him, to make certain that he’s bringing in enough men, that they’ll be willing to fight for Wilson Fisk as soon as he’s out of Ryker’s, but she’s stuck here in this alley, and there’s blood on her tongue, and she can’t move.

Somehow the fact that she, too, is technically one of Fisk’s men doesn’t occur to her until hours after it’s done. The idea that that same thing might happen to her barely coasts along the edge of her panic.

 _This is what my father did._ She tries to lay what vague image she has of Willie Lincoln over Finn Brannigan’s face, tries to picture the blade and the blood, but there’s only him dying on the floor in her head. She can’t picture it. _He killed people, cleaned up after the Rigoletto Maggia,_ but she can only see him the victim, blood-smeared and broken, wiping his hand over her nose and mouth. _Run._ All her memories before that moment are so foggy, now, wreathed in mist. _Run, Maya, don’t look back_. What she was before that moment doesn’t matter anymore, and maybe it never did. _Run. Run. Run._

 _That’s in me,_ she thinks. _The ability to do that, that’s in me._ She’s known that, cognitively, since Wilson told her what her father did for Don Rigoletto, but this is different. This is seeing it, feeling it. Blood on the floor. _That’s in me. Get it out of me. I don’t want this. I can’t kill a man, not like that. I can’t do that for anyone. I won’t._

But she has to go back. Her father’s dead. Wilson is in prison. _Insects,_ she thinks, _insecticide._ If her father was the kind of man who could murder for a living, and her foster father is the kind of man who can kill for a greater cause, how is she supposed to be able to turn around and walk away from this job that needs to be done?

Is that even what Wilson’s doing, the greater cause? _People aren’t people, to him. They died because they were in the way._ Two pockmarks burned into the flesh of his throat. _What am I? What is he? What is Vanessa? What kind of creatures are we, doing this?_

_I’m not like them. But they’re both in me, so aren’t I just the same?_

Across the street, something moves. It’s Shaun. Shaun who carries three separate pistols, Shaun who still has his ears, and Shaun who catches sight of her and jogs over to blink at the top of the alley, not crossing into it with her, just watching. “He wants you.”

“I’m not going in there,” Maya says.

“The fucking hell are you doing being so damn squeamish,” Shaun says, and she thinks, _For someone who looked like they were about to wet themselves when Brannigan turned all that on you, you’re being damn flippant about someone’s goddamn life_. “That bitch from the Manfredis sent you to protect him, so protect him. It’s your job. Especially now that the Devil’s looking for him.”

“The Devil and Lilith.”

Shaun scoffs. “Lilith we can handle.”

“Clearly.” She draws her fists out from behind her back. “Since you did so well back in the catacombs.”

Light flickers back and forth over his face like prison bars. “The fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“Exactly what it sounded like.” She pops her wrist. “You all had your asses handed to you.”

“By the Devil.”

“By _both_ of them.” And mostly by Lilith, because once the Punisher had escaped his ropes Daredevil had had his hands full. “She’s just as dangerous as he is. Not recognizing that is an idiot move.”

“Whatever.” He curses under his breath in Irish—she assumes it’s a curse, his teeth snap at the air like it’s a curse—and then says, “Not like either of them will be much of a problem soon anyway.”

She’s all at once deeply aware of the way that her sheath is scraping against the small of her back, how it weighs against her skin. She wants her knife in her hand. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Can’t explain,” he says. “Don’t have time. I have work to do. Like you do.”

“He’s not supposed to go after them directly, Shaun. Not yet. That wasn’t the agreement.”

Shaun lifts a hand, already walking away. He’s speaking, but he’s turned, and she can’t read the words. Maya stands buzzing on the balls of her feet, watching him go, palms sweaty. _That wasn’t the agreement._ Brannigan’s shifting, spiraling. She’s not sure he was ever under control, not like Vanessa thought. _Smiling Finn, Finn Brannigan,_ and he’s not stupid, not by any means, but—

_Devil’s due._

She stalks across the road, and slams into the crackhouse.

 _Devil’s due,_ she thinks. _Fools rush in where angels fear to tread._

Brannigan’s finally out of bed. He’s in a wheelchair, yes, since his shoulder’s as fucked as his knee and he can’t use crutches, but he’s out of bed, and he’s been reading. Books stack up against the far wall, away from the mildew and the decay. Joyce. Austen. Kafka. Dickens and the Brontës. He knows she’s there, standing in the doorway, but he doesn’t look up from his page. He just lifts his head enough so she can see his mouth when he says, “You’re late.”

The inside of her lip is puffy and uncomfortable from where she’s bitten it to keep herself quiet, blood streaking over her lower teeth. She has the oddest feeling that he can smell it, the way a shark could, a single drop in gallons of salt water. Maya keeps her mouth shut.

 “I’d apologize for the mess that O’Reardon made,” he says, “but I don’t have the patience for dealing with a fastidious girl.”

“You can’t drag them in yet,” she says. “Lilith and Daredevil. We’re not ready.”

“You’re not ready.” He turns the page. “Miss Manfredi isn’t ready. I am.”

“We’re supposed to be working together.”

“Silvia Manfredi doesn’t want a partner, she wants a follower. I’m not looking to be one.”

 _Christ, Vanessa._ “If you pull them into it now then your entire family could wind up in the crossfire, hasn’t that happened enough this year?”

“Hell’s Kitchen isn’t their neighborhood.” Brannigan shuts his copy of _Atlas Shrugged,_ sets it aside. “It’s mine. It was mine, until Fisk stole it away. It’s not theirs, and never has been. It’s time that they be reminded of it.”

“They took Fisk down. They took the Punisher down. They’re not people you just _taunt_.”

“Frank Castle will be dealt with.” He folds his fingers together, and looks so terrifyingly like Wilson for a moment that her knees start swimming. “After they’ve been eliminated. I’m cleaning house, little echo, I wouldn’t get in the way.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“I thought that’s what you called yourself.”

Maya looks at him, and waits.

“Have I offended you somehow, Miss Maya Lopez?” He picks up a butter knife from the tabletop, and spins it between his fingers. “I’m not in the business of asking for permission. Daredevil and Lilith need to be eliminated, and I’m not some puppy to be told when to bite or no.”

“Silvia—”

“—is her father’s daughter, but not in a league with me.”

 _There’s no league,_ she nearly says. _You were gone for fifteen fucking years._ But there’s still blood on the floor in the hallway, and she doesn’t say that. “What are you going to do?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Maybe I think you’re right,” she says. It’s bilious. “Maybe I’m interested.”

“You can’t play me, girl.”

“I’m not playing.” _This is nowhere near a game._ “I can’t protect you if I don’t know what your game is.”

His eyes slit. Brannigan taps the tip of the butter knife against the table. “Still following orders?”

“I said before, I go where I’m needed. And I have my own reasons to hate Daredevil and Lilith.”

“You never struck me as the type to switch allegiances.”

Maya shrugs. He flickers the knife between his fingers, flashing silver, a spiral over his knuckles. She can still see the dried blood out of the corner of her eye, smeared across the hallway in two great streaks. O’Reardon’s trail, leading out the door.

“Fisk was a bloody bastard,” Brannigan says, “but he had one thing right. You can get the masks to do anything you like, go anywhere you want, if you use their own people against them. He nearly killed Daredevil when the fool came after that bloody lawyer woman. Hit them in their soft spots, they bleed out like anyone else.”

She’d thought her heart was racing before, but now—her mind’s a tempest. Maya sinks into the chair opposite him, presses her hands flat to the table. “You mean Nelson, Murdock, and Lewis?”

“Worked once. No point in wasting an opportunity.” He shrugs. “Besides, they’re a way in to Castle. Two birds, one stone.”

“Nobody’s been able to get close to the lawyers.” _Not even Vanessa._ Though she’d suggested it, too, too many people have suggested it, and none of them have succeeded, she doesn’t think, but—

“I’m not nobody,” says Brannigan.

 “The yakuza did that and lost one of their top men.”

“I’m not the yakuza either,” Brannigan says. “And I’m not stupid enough to be in the same fucking room. Are you here to help me, woman, or are you here to natter?”

“I’m just saying that I don’t think—”

“And I didn’t ask what you thought, did I?

She bites her tongue. “I’m supposed to keep you alive,” she says. “Helping you lure Daredevil and Lilith into a dark corner so they can tear your throat out doesn’t strike me as helping your heart keep beating.”

“You nervous, Maya?” Brannigan’s lips peel back from his teeth. “Or is it you don’t want to get your pretty hands dirty?”

“No,” she says. “You’re just stupider than I thought you were.”

There’s a flicker, and a shift, and she catches his wrist before his hand can find her cheek. He’s strong, even with his ruined shoulder, strong enough that his tendons stand out against her fingers when he tries to wrench away, but Maya’s as strong as he is, and she doesn’t let go. Skin scrapes underneath her fingernails.

“You ever try to hit me again,” she says, unblinking, “and you lose the hand.”

Brannigan _snarls_. “Don’t threaten me.”

Maya twists until his elbow torques. Then, and only then, does she let go, and it might have been a mistake considering the look on his face, to humiliate him, but she’s done with people trying to talk over her. She’s _done_. “I’m not your punching bag.”

She leaves before he can snarl, before he can speak, before she can lose her nerve. Maya stands on the threshold of the hideaway, fights the urge to draw her knife from its sheath. Then she pulls up the hood of her sweatshirt, digs her fists deeper into the pockets of her jacket, and makes for Hell’s Kitchen.

_I will not be like my father._

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.

She’s most of the way asleep—okay, she’s all of the way asleep, she was out as soon as she hit the pillow, and no, they did not have sex, exhaustion is a thing—when the phone rings. It’s only thanks to Matt fisting his hand up in the back of her shirt and dragging her back that she doesn’t roll right off the bed and gash her elbow on that _goddamn bedside table_ like she’s done twice or three times in the past six months alone. (Thanks, shitty sleep schedule. And Matt’s evil furniture.) She doesn’t actually know what time it is, or who’s calling, she just snags the phone, presses her face into the pillow, and says, into the feathers, “Fuck _off_.”

“That’s friendly,” Elektra says. “After you ask for help with your cold case, that’s what you tell me? I’ve been doing a lot of legwork for you, you realize.”

 _Of course. Of fucking course._ “What do you want, Elektra?”

“I found something,” Elektra says, “about your dead man,” and Matt’s suddenly, hummingly awake next to her. She shuts her eyes, pushes herself onto her back and ignores the way her hair tangles in front of her eyes.

“Which dead man, the Montana one or the New York one?”

“Since when is there a New York one?”

“Since the Irish have been getting persnickety.”

“Oh,” says Elektra. “I thought you dealt with the Irish.”

“I thought we had too.” She stares at the ceiling. “This really has to be a four AM phone call? This couldn’t have waited?”

“No.”

“You absolutely sure?”

“I told you two days. It’s been two days and six hours. My time is limited.”

“So’s my sanity,” Darcy says, and sits up. Matt doesn’t. He lies there, face turned to her and the phone, and props his chin in one hand to listen. “Could’ve waited until after, y’know. Sunrise.”

“No, it couldn’t.” Elektra’s all curly and pleased with herself. “Better to do this work in the dark. Besides, I thought you’d be awake, considering your fisticuffs. And Twitter inanities.”

“Har-de-har.” Darcy rests her elbow on her upraised knee, rubs at the space between her eyebrows. “What’d you find?”

“Now, you have to promise you won’t be cross,” says Elektra. “I went looking into those files you gave me, the Rigoletto-Lincoln murder. I had a number of very interesting talks with people who used to be affiliated with Rigoletto’s organization fifteen years ago—”

“Do I want to know what these discussions entailed?”

“Will you be grumpy if I say I beat them up for answers?” Christ, Elektra might be _teasing_. It’s probably more of the mess-with-Matt bullshit, but weirdly, Darcy kind of wants to laugh. “Or threatened them with pointed objects?”

 “We all know how you feel about pointy things.”

“Excellent tools,” says Elektra. “Quite useful. I didn’t kill anyone, if you’re worrying.”

“Better not have,” says Matt under his breath, and crams his head under the pillow. _Like that’s going to do anything to cut off your hearing, boyo._ Darcy squeezes his upper arm, leaves her hand there.

“Didn’t say a word.”

“Nobody died. I even called an ambulance for one of them. It was all very Good Samaritan of me.” Elektra takes a breath. A siren echoes somewhere over the line. “I have a name for you.”

“How’d you get that?”

“I told you, pointed objects.”

“Okie-doke, Faith.” She curls her toes into the blankets. “What’s the name?”

“Daniel Larkspur,” says Elektra, relishing it. “He was an assassin and a bodyguard for a number of people in Rigoletto’s organization from the nineties to the early two-thousands, until he died seven years ago in a car accident that the police labeled a tragic mishap. Don’t ask how I know any of that, you won’t like the answer.”

“One of my best friends tortures people with bomb arrows, my legal assistant is a part-time hacker, and I spend my nights throwing criminals out of windows. I don’t really care if you broke into police files.”

“You _are_ fun.” Another siren, and the long blare of a car horn. “Daniel Larkspur had no record, he was clean, but when I found a back door into the NYPD database and started hunting through hits performed by the Rigolettos after Lincoln’s death, I found a man named A. L. Burr who was suspected of seventeen different killing before he abruptly vanished in 2009.”

“A. Burr, seriously?”

“Alistair,” says Elektra. “Not Aaron. But it’s still amusing. The photographs match the autopsy records of Daniel Larkspur. I assume the L stands for his nickname. He went by Larks.”

“So a gangster named Burr murdered another gangster named Lincoln and everyone made US history jokes for days.” Darcy weaves her fingers into the blanket. “You sure Larks is the one who beat Willie Lincoln to death?”

“Well, him and his friends, who all later perished in exceptionally well-timed accidents. According to one of the men I spoke to it was an open secret that Larks was jealous of all the jobs that Lincoln was getting. The only person who didn’t know was Don Rigoletto, and it seems to have been carefully organized to keep the information from him up until Fisk snapped his neck last year.” Elektra makes a gleeful little noise, chirpy like a cat. “Larks had already been dead for years by then but apparently no one had had the balls to let their boss know the truth.”

“Yeah, well, I wouldn’t have either, judging by what I remember about Rigoletto and his temper.” She hooks her hair out of her face. “So what’s the time-sensitive thing? Seems like you found the answer, and all of this could have waited until the morning.”

“No, it couldn’t have.” She’s practically purring with how pleased with herself she is, holy shit. “Meet me on the roof of the Totleigh Arms at Lexington and 21st in forty-five minutes. Don’t come in costume.”

Elektra hangs up before Darcy can say anything more. She stares at the screen of the phone, and rubs at her eyes with the heel of her palm, throwing her cell back onto the bedside table and burrowing under the blankets to press her nose to Matt’s sternum. He emerges from under the pillows, and makes a grumpy little sound.

“I don’t want to get up,” Darcy says. “Really don’t.”

“You going to go?”

“Don’t you think I should? If Marisol’s father was murdered by this guy Larks and Elektra has information on why, then I should at least have a look at whatever she’s found.” She waits. “Not going to tell me I shouldn’t go alone?”

“Would you listen?” he says, in an odd voice. Darcy snaps him a look, but when he doesn’t push she shuts her eyes again.

“I mean, she hasn’t given me any reason to think that she’s actually going to do anything to me.” Her wrist is getting squashed under his ribcage. “I asked her to look into this. If she’s found an answer using whatever sketchy connections she has, then that’s still an answer I can give Marisol, and then I can cut ties with this whole investigation and focus on Brannigan and the yakuza. One more thing off my plate.”

“Still.”

“I’ll be fine.” She feathers her mouth to the scar beneath his collarbone. “I won’t be alone. Besides, one of us should get some sleep.”

“You won’t be able to read through files if you can’t focus your eyes.”

“Then I’ll borrow Wilma.”

Matt coughs when she pushes up off his rib cage, swings her legs out of bed. “I still find it strange that you named my text-to-speech reader.” 

“It works, though. She feels like a Wilma.” Darcy grabs a bra off the floor, strips her T-shirt off and fastens the hooks together at the front. “I’ll figure something out after the sun comes up.”

By the time she shuffles the bra around to its proper place and fixes the straps, Matt’s propped himself up on one elbow, resting his chin in his hand. He presses two fingers to the Templar cross at the small of her back. “Be careful. Whatever Elektra wants to show you more than likely has a tendency to bite.”

“That’s what I figured.” She pulls a knee up against her chest, watches him. “I won’t let my guard down, don’t worry.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You think really loudly when you want to.”

He circles his thumb around the cross. “I just don’t want you getting hurt, that’s all.”

“I know.” She considers, and then winds her hair up into a ponytail, snags a tie off the bedside table. “You know she’s not going to try to pull the Sweeney thing with me, right? ”

Matt rubs at his jaw. “Doesn’t mean nothing will happen.”

“No, but the same kind of nothing could happen if I were meeting with Kate.” She shrugs. “Elektra thought you understood her. She doesn’t think the same of me. She’s not going to try and get me to kill anyone, and she’s definitely not going to do it for fun. You know she’s not going to hurt me, she’s not petty, not like that.”

“I know.”

“You sure that’s not a whale shark thing?”

His lips flicker, and settle. “Are _you_ sure that’s not a whale shark thing?”

“About a hundred percent,” she says, “yeah,” and kisses him quickly. “Go back to sleep.” 

“I would, if you’d shoo.”

“Asshole.” Darcy whacks him with a pillow. “See if I bring you back any coffee.”

“Because that’s a thing that needs to wind up on Twitter. _Lilith Visits Local Starbucks, Orders Venti Macchiato With Extra Caramel._ ”

“I’d probably get a discount, I’ve rescued half the baristas in the neighborhood.” She hits him with the pillow again, and bounces out of bed. “Asshole.”

“At least I’m pretty.”

“Not if you keep getting punched in the face, you won’t be.”

She dodges the pillow he tosses at her, and leaves the room laughing.

Darcy does draw the line at leaving without coffee, though. She drags a thermos with her, something Karen had given her upon realizing that they’d all missed her birthday during the Frank debacle. (Thanks, Frank, for picking August to pull all your shit.) It’s mostly empty by the time she makes it to Gramercy Park, but when she pops up on top of the Totleigh Arms, a swanky new apartment building catering to all the fashionable hipsters New York has to offer, there’s still a little bit left. Elektra, settled on the edge of the building with her legs over the side, turns to look at her with her mask pulled up over her mouth. “You’re late.”

“Am not,” Darcy says automatically, and stays well back from the edge. She can deal with it when she’s running and doesn’t have time to look down, but she can’t just—sit on the edge and not feel like she’s gonna die. Fire escapes are much different animals. Fire escapes have bars. And metal bits. And things to hold onto. They’re not sheer drops off of brick or concrete and they _definitely_ don’t have gargoyles to laugh when you fall and die.  “You said forty-five minutes, it’s been thirty.” She offers the thermos. “Even with coffee.”

Elektra looks at the thermos, and then at Darcy, and then pulls her mask down. No lipstick, not right now. Either the mask has rubbed it away, or she never put it on in the first place. She looks like she’s missing war paint. “You brought coffee?”

“You might have had a chance to sleep the past few days, but I haven’t. My blood is brown.” Darcy tips it from side to side. “I drank most of it already, but, y’know.”

She might as well be offering a dead mouse to an elephant. “I don’t like American coffee.”

“You’re Satan,” Darcy says, and crouches down. “What are we doing in Gramercy Park?”

“Looking for new apartments, I’m getting sick of my father’s place.”

“My sides are splitting.” She unscrews the lid of the thermos, pours coffee for herself. “Seriously, what are we doing here, Elektra?”

Elektra blows hair out of her eyes, and doesn’t fix her mask. “The man who gave me Daniel Larkspur’s name fainted before I could get any more useful information out of him, but thankfully other members of Rigoletto’s old organization weren’t nearly so uncooperative. According to police files, Larks mainly worked alone, but the few notable times he did work with others, he generally ran with the same crowd.” She curls her fingers into the edge of the building. “Most of _those_ men, unfortunately, have been placed into custody thanks to the dismantling of the Kingpin’s organization, and I’m not particularly welcome in Ryker’s, for a variety of reasons.”

“Couldn’t be because of your reputation, could it?”

Elektra flashes teeth. “Of course not. Fortunately for you, and your client, I pulled a few strings. There’s still one man who Larks ran with that remains out of custody. His name was blacked out in the police files, but after a bit of digging—and you don’t want to know how much that cost me, your poor heart will shatter—”

“Could do without the bragging.”

“—I managed to get his new name, and a location.” She blows hair out of her eyes. “It’s partially why I’m six hours late on my deadline. It took a great deal of time to find and encourage the right people.”

“Like who?”

“Never you mind,” Elektra says, mysteriously. “I’ll just say that I now owe people favors I would rather not owe, so you, in turn, owe me for this, Lilith. No matter what happens with the yakuza, you owe me for this.”

“Understood.” Darcy finishes the coffee, settles the thermos up against the edge of the roof. “So I’m assuming you found him.”

“His name’s Samuel Silke. The man turned tail for the FBI as soon as Fisk started gaining power in Rigoletto’s organization, worked primarily as a confidential informant, but it meant he stayed out of the hands of the criminal justice system at the end of it all. He goes by Micah Stone, now. Lives in this building,” says Elektra, and swings her legs back over onto the roof proper again. The sweat on Darcy’s palms doesn’t budge, but at least she doesn’t have her heart in her throat anymore. _Christ_ , she hates being this close to the edge of a building out of costume. “Apartment 7C. It was as good a place to meet as any.”

“What does this have to do with why Larks murdered Willie Lincoln?”

“One of the last people to see Samuel Silke before he went off the grid said he said something about Larks killing Lincoln for something specific, not a job but—”

“But?”

Elektra shrugs.

“You don’t know.”

“Not a clue.”  

“So, what, we’re breaking into the guy’s apartment to throw him a surprise party?”

“Lord, no,” Elektra says. “I’ve already played the waiting game twice this week, and both of those apartments were completely disappointing. No good food. No, we’re breaking into his club.”

“…run that one by me again.”

“Unfortunately the thing about getting information from relevant parties means that people now know the information is valuable.” Elektra purses her lips. “Partially why killing your informants after you’re done with them can be a useful tactic. At least that way nobody survives to let the other rats know they’re being hunted. Don’t make that face.”

“You’re not even looking at me.”

“You fairly radiate disapproval, it’s very distinct.” She stretches her arms high up over her head, goes on tiptoe and balances. “No, Silke is already aware of the fact that people will be looking for him. If he has any kind of sense, he’ll have contacted his handlers with the FBI to try and bully them into putting him into witness protection. It’s up in the air as to whether or not they’ll agree, but if they do, he’ll be beyond even my reach.”

“So your plan is to go wait at his club instead?”

“Silke used his immunity that he gained through working as a rat on Rigoletto to protect himself from the fallout of Fisk’s downfall. He’s set himself up very nicely here in Gramercy, owns a club a few blocks away from here called the Pearl.”

“What kind of club are we talking about here?”

“Not invitation only, but fairly private. Difficult to get into, if you don’t play your cards right.”

“Great,” says Darcy, only half under her breath. “It’ll be closing soon, won’t it?”

“Not until six.” Elektra cracks her knuckles. “He’ll be there tonight. There was a note on his dining table about a meeting he had at three o’clock—”

“You totally broke into his apartment already.”

“I had to do _something_ while I was waiting for you to show up.” She shrugs. “Since he’s not back here yet, he’s presumably still at work.”

“You don’t know for sure?”

“Silke isn’t coming back here, not tonight, possibly not ever. He’s heard about what happened to Caesar Cicero by now, he won’t feel safe in his own apartment.”

“I don’t want to know.” Darcy rubs her eyes. “I really don’t want to know. Okay, so—club. I’m not exactly dressed for a club.” 

“Nonsense,” Elektra says. “The jeans will do well enough since they’re dark. Just take off your sweatshirt.”

“…in a club.”

She makes an odd little noise through her nose. “You’ll be able to break the spine of anyone who tries anything, you realize.”

“It’s not that, I don’t care about that, I’ll snap noses if people try to touch me. It’s—” She’s being childish. “I don’t like people seeing the scars.”

“You show off the one on your hand often enough.”

Darcy stares hard up at the sky, and then drags her sweatshirt off and ties it around her waist. The bruises show up livid on her arms, the cut from the fight in the Commodore unbandaged. She can see it when Elektra picks out the marks, not just on her hand but the gashes on her arm from the Goodman attack, from Nobu. Three in a row along her forearm, one deeper than the rest. There are others too, new ones from the past year. A pockmark from a burn just underneath her collarbone, a twist just beneath the red-and-black band on her upper arm from a lucky taser. The mark from Frank’s shotgun pellet is still raw and pink on her shoulder. Nothing quite on the level of Matt’s gash, but there are enough. She lifts both eyebrows. “Like I said. There are scars. People might ask questions.”

“I have scars too,” Elektra says. Her eyes flicker from Darcy’s face to her collarbone and then down, evaluatory. “So we’ll match. Besides, the lighting in there will be shit, and we can always buy cover-up on the way.”

“You can’t go to a club in a mask.”

“And you can’t go without mascara.”

“You mean the rings of death under my eyes don’t work well enough?”

Elektra cracks like a raven, and heaves open the roof access door. “Depends on what kind of look you’re aiming for.”

She winds up taking the mascara, stopping in a Walgreens (sweatshirt back on, because fuck the fluros) to snag cheap eyeshadow, a fuckton of cover-up (tattoos, too, are a thing that she needs to hide), and a tube of bright red lipstick that will probably bleach her face out to bone under whatever lighting the Pearl will inflict. Sunglasses, too, because they change the shape of her face, make her harder to remember. Elektra vanishes into the pharmacy bathroom and reemerges looking like she just fucked someone against a wall, her hair all mussed and the souvenir shirt she’d just bought shredded enough to flash scraps of black lacy bra through the gaps, slit and tied into a crop top. And yeah, there are scars, a few on her arms and more flaring through the holes in the shirt, one or two on her shoulders. There’s a big one that Darcy only catches glimpses of, creeping out from the waistband of her leggings. Hard and ropey, knotted at the top, like someone had tried to cut her open. It’s unsettlingly like the mark on Matt from Nobu’s blade-and-chain, and she keeps her eyes away from it as they wander the three blocks from Silke’s apartment to the Pearl.

They don’t go in through the front. Of course they don’t; Darcy very sincerely doubts they’d get in through the front door, no matter how they look. Instead, they cross around to the back, to the alley door marked _Pearl Employees Only_ in artfully scraggling graffiti lettering. Elektra winds her hand up under her shirt and draws a tiny lockpick kit from beneath the strap of her bra, setting two picks between her teeth. It’s a fairly easy lock, only takes a minute, but her palms are sweating and her heart is darting at a speed that Darcy doesn’t like _at all_ by the time the lock finally pops, and Elektra tucks one of the picks behind her ear. “In,” she says, “quickly,” and Darcy slides past her into the dark of the Pearl.

It’s Gramercy Park, and that means the fashion week rejects have descended. She can’t quite decide if the customers in here are a more complex blend of _fashionable but pretending not to care_ and _actually caring like whoa_ or _I found this in a thrift shop and modified it myself_ mixed with _my parents spent five hundred dollars on this torn white T-shirt from Kanye’s line._ It’s four in the morning and it’s only now just starting to wind down, she’s pretty sure, people still tangled together in booths and on the floor, hanging on the bar like they’re getting paid to turn into Venus fly traps and swallow other people whole. In her cheap sunglasses, it’s even dimmer than she’d anticipated, and she nearly trips two feet into the club proper over someone’s bag. _Well, at least I look like I fit in._

“This will be fun,” Elektra says right in her ear, and hooks two fingers into the waistband of Darcy’s skinny jeans to hold her upright. The hair on the back of her neck stands up. They do have a cover, at least, sketched out in vague terms. _Not drunk but playing, looking for somewhere fun on a weeknight._ The Pearl would fit the bill for bored socialites trying to get a taste of Real Life before class the next morning, that’s for sure. “How many guards do you see?”

“Six.” Then—“Seven if you include the bartender. Why are you clinging?”

“If you’d rather people overhear what I’m saying, I can move back.”

 _And let you think you’re intimidating me? No way._ “Whatever. You know, it’d be easier for me if I knew what Samuel Silke looked like.”

“Micah Stone, now, dear. And he’s not in here, he’ll probably be in the back.” Elektra snags a drink off the nearest table, and sniffs it once before tasting. “Ugh. Appletini.”

“You could catch a disease doing that,” Darcy says. She hooks an arm around Elektra’s ribs, ignores the way that one of the guys at the nearest table perks up like he’s seen the pot at the end of the rainbow. _By which I mean the MJ, not gold, because hoo, boy, you’re giving me a headache already with that weedy aroma, son._ “As an FYI.”

“What’s life without risk?”

“A life without risk is a life where I don’t have to carry you out of here bridal style because you managed to get your ass roofied.”

“I’m pleased I at least warrant bridal style.” Her nostrils still flare, though. She doesn’t try it again. “Easier not to look out of place with a drink. Manager’s office?”

“Probably down there.” There’s a helpful sign marked _Employee’s Only,_ and two guards bracketing the entrance like statues in a tomb. “So what was the plan, we just wing it, snag chances as they come?”

“Essentially.” A drunk dancer nearly staggers into them. Darcy tugs Elektra out of the way without comment.. “Or make a chance, somehow.”

“Great.” Fuck it. The bartender’s one of the guards, and if there are seven in total, then— “I’m getting a goddamn shot.”

“Won’t mix well with coffee.”

“Yeah, but it’ll help keep me from screaming, and it’ll look more natural than stealing other people’s martinis off of tables.” Darcy takes the glass from Elektra, sets it back where she found it. “You’re the rich girl, you’re buying.”

“If you insist,” Elektra says, in a voice that’s more like a purr than anything. She hooks her arm around Darcy’s neck— _note to self: if you forget to wear heels around the always-heeled Elektra, she’ll use her boots against you_ —and herds her to the bar. “Seven men. Simple enough.”

“Neither of us are masked, before you get any ideas about starting a fight. I’d really rather not wind up disbarred trying to find this guy.”

“Oh, boo, since when has a bar fight disbarred anyone?”

“Since always.”

“Boo,” Elektra says again.

“Party pooper, that’s me.” There’s a guy at the counter watching them out of the corner of his eye. Ogler, she decides. Not guard. Darcy leans back against the bar. “ _Así que quieres dejarlo a la suerte o tienes algún tipo de plan?_ ”

Elektra’s eyes go sharp. “ _Así que ahora guardamos secretos en español_?”

“ _Sí_.” Darcy’s been spending the past year working her shit back up to standard level, but there’s a fluidity that Elena has that she can’t match. She eyes the guy at the counter again. “ _Estoy bastante segura que nadie aquí podrá entender más de tres palabras de esto._ ”

“ _No puedes estar segura de eso_."

“ _Elektra, son hipsters. No hablan español, solo le ponen calaveras de azúcar a sus camisetas y pretenden que no cometen un robo a la cultura_." She clears her throat, and says, loudly. " _El hombre a mi izquierda apesta como si se hubiera arrastrado fuera de una alcantarilla y debería nadar con anguilas eléctricas_."

“Hey, gorgeous, you Mexican?” says Drunk Guy, and Darcy rolls her eyes and turns back to Elektra.

“ _Genial_.”

“Wait a minute.” Drunk Guy shifts one stool over. “Can I buy you ladies a drink?”

“No,” says Darcy.

He makes a face. “You sure?”

“Yes,” Elektra says, before Darcy can speak. “We’re sure.”

“You two sisters or something?”

Darcy rolls her eyes. “ _Great._ ”

“ _Eres una pequeña amargada, no?_ _,_ ” says Elektra, and starts spinning a ring on her finger, one-two-three-pause, one-two-three-pause. Three cycles of three and then another pause, longer. Then it starts again. “ _Él es un idiota, eso es todo._ ”

“ _No me importa si es un idiota._ ”

“Sure you don’t want a drink?”

“How about fries, instead,” Darcy says, and makes herself smile. “They’re cheaper.”

“Didn’t offer you food.”

“French fries or nothing, dude.”

Drunk Guy—who might not be as drunk as he looks, now that she thinks about it—scoffs under his breath, and starts muttering about ungrateful assholes. Next to her, Elektra shifts until her shoulder knocks into Darcy’s, and doesn’t move away. She hadn’t felt unsafe before, not really, but—whatever. She feels better, now. Weird as it is that it’s because of Elektra.

“What can I get for you ladies?” says the bartender.

“Tequila,” Elektra says. “Mescal if possible.”

Darcy’s never even heard of Mescal, but the bartender cocks an eyebrow. “You sure? It kicks you in the teeth.”

Elektra’s forehead wrinkles. She leans—not just leans, but _leans_ —until her head tips onto Darcy’s bare shoulder. And _well, okay. That’s continuing, then. Cool._ She’s changed her perfume, Darcy thinks. From whatever the stormy thing was to something that leaves an aftertaste like sea salt and ocean water. “I don’t know, Lizzy, am I sure?”

 _Lizzy?_ Lilith, Lizzy, Darcy. Right. “Tequila is seconded.”

“If you say so,” says the bartender.

“Thanks,” Darcy says, and he vanishes. A few seconds later, Elektra lifts her head, and fusses with her hair again. Drunk Guy is still blatantly staring, though this time it’s more in a _shit I’m an asshole who pays for bad lesbian porn_ way than a _shit I’m an asshole who will pressure you to take a drink from me_ way. “Do I want to know how much you’re going to wind up paying for that?”

“No.”

“Fine.” She threads her hair back up out of her eyes, nearly knocks Elektra in the shoulder with her elbow. “ _El club cerrará en cuarenta minutos, muy probablemente. No tenemos un montón de tiempo para perderlo con esto._ ”

“ _Si empezar una pelea está completamente fuera de las posibilidades—_ ”

“ _Lo está._ ”

Elektra crumples her mouth. “ _Entonces pretendemos._ ”

“ _Qué? Solo entramos como si nos perteneciera el lugar_?”

“ _Funciona mejor de lo que crees, cariño._ ” Elektra snags the tequila from the bartender, and toasts the mirror behind the bar. “ _Puedes conseguir que se haga cualquier cosa que quieres cuando actúas como si supieras lo que haces._ ”

“Story of my life,” says Darcy under her breath, and Elektra winks. “Quit with the _Pride and Prejudice_ jokes, though, or I’m gonezo.”

“Not Rizzo?”

She swirls the tequila in the glass. It’s been a while since Darcy’s dared tequila, since usually all it does is give her a headache, but this is expensive shit. Whatever name Elektra dropped fucking delivered. “Are you calling me a Muppet or a rat?”

“Would Selina be better?”

“Whatever, Elphaba,” says Darcy, and Elektra smirks into her glass. _Well, that went better than expected._ “ _Estas segura de que no hay ninguna cámara por aquí?”_

“ _Aquí? No. Y respecto a las que se encuentran detrás, tengo una manera de arreglar eso._ ”

“You sure?”

“Positive,” says Elektra. “I’m very good at scrubbing things.”

“I don’t get it,” says Drunk Guy. “Is that some kinda dyke-y metaphor, or—”

“Seriously,” says Darcy. “Fuck off, or I break your nose.”

She’s not sure if it’s the tone or the way she refuses to even look at him, stares hard at her glass of tequila and sits there with her shoulders rigid as stakes, but Drunk Guy fucks off. She’s pretty sure she catches _bitch_ muttered under his breath as he goes, but he does in fact go, and she doesn’t get tossed out for physical assault, so all of that’s excellent. Elektra watches her from the corner of her eye, lashes flickering a bit.

“I would have just done it,” Elektra says, after a moment.

“That’s assault. You get arrested for that.”

She shrugs. Darcy flexes her fingers—they’re still, considering the temper snarling between her teeth—and lets the tequila wash into her head. She stops after two sips, because she really doesn’t need to wind up buzzed on top of exhausted, especially considering she has work in—Christ. Less than six hours. “ _Si vamos a hacer esto deberíamos empezar ahora_ ,” she says, low, and Elektra leans again, knocking her temple to Darcy’s shoulder, “ _no lo crees_?”

“ _Espera por tres minutos_.” She doesn’t raise her head, still aside from swirling her glass. It feels kind of like a man-eating tiger just sat down and stuck its head in her lap. Darcy’s more afraid of being bitten than in awe of the concept. “ _Hacerlo rápido podría arruinarlo de la misma manera que si lo hiciéramos despacio_.”

Darcy heaves a sigh. After all, it’s not like she’s wrong. “Fine.”

Elektra doesn’t budge.

“Still no word from your guy about the code?”

“No. Our friends—” she wrinkles her nose “—tend to have the common sense to keep their best writers concealed. I think I’m getting close, but there’s no way to be sure until I have the name. I’ve narrowed it down to three, though.”

“Mm.”

Elektra shifts her head, sits up straight. “How many do you have?”

“What?”

“Tattoos.” She traces the lip of her glass. “You bought a lot of cover-up, is all.”

“I have as many as I need,” Darcy says, and means, _don’t ask me about my tattoos_. She doesn’t want to explain them, not to Elektra, not really. “Are you thinking about getting one?”

“I never considered it.” Her eyes jump from one of Darcy’s wrists to the other. The marks are covered, but the make-up’s cheap, and you can still make out the outlines. Plus, the cut from the Commodore really shouldn’t have make-up in it, so she’d left that alone. _Yay for me being marked up like whoa._ “Tattoos are unique. If I had one done, that would make me identifiable.”

“Like you’re not already.”

“Not when I don’t want to be.” She leans back, drums her nails against the countertop. “Are the scars all from Nobu, too?”

Darcy folds one hand over the marks on her forearm. She doesn’t need to, they’re covered decently, but she does it anyway. The feel of them under her palm makes the back of her neck sweat. “Are we swapping war stories?”

Something snaps closed around Elektra’s eyes. Darcy hadn’t even realized it was open, until the lock clicked into place. “If you don’t want to say, then don’t.”

“I wasn’t offended.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Elektra says, carelessly, and _ah, shit, I’ve stepped in it, haven’t I_. “I don’t care, I just can’t stand awkward silences.”

“Elektra—”

“I don’t care,” Elektra says again. Down at the other end of the bar, the bartender swirls whiskey in a bottle. “Two more minutes, we should be good.”

“Fine.”

Shit. She sips at the tequila, swallows past the burn. _What did I just fuck up_? Because she’s pretty sure she just fucked up, and she’s too tired, she can’t process, but it feels like—maybe, possibly—

_Was she trying to talk to me?_

_You should hate me. Matthew hates me._

“One of these came from Nobu,” she says, and touches the deeper scar on her forearm. Elektra’s gaze flickers and burns at her skin. “The other two were from some Jersey assholes.”

For a minute, there’s nothing. Elektra drinks her tequila, and Darcy stares at the wall. The bartender down at the other end of the room starts swirling a whiskey bottle, chats with one of the guys from security. He points out one of the gangs of hipsters ( _what’s the word for a group of hipsters? A gaggle, an inquisition, an absurdity?_ ) and Beefy Security Dude wanders over to look intimidating and herd the absurdity out the door. Then she coughs. “Nice of them to put the marks in a row. They match this way.”

“Yeah, well, they stung like a wicked bitch at the time.”

Elektra settles her tumbler of tequila on the bartop, and catches at Darcy’s wrist to turn her hand palm-side up. She’s looking at the bruises, Darcy thinks, not the scars anymore. (There hadn’t been enough cover-up to hide all the blotches; she’d just given up after a while.) After a moment, Elektra braces her arm next to Darcy’s on the counter, points to a dip on the inside of her elbow. “That’s from training. I torqued my elbow and a bowstring took skin out with it.”

“You know how to use a bow?”

“I know how to use a lot of sharp things.”

 _And this is why we don’t introduce you to Kate unless it’s absolutely necessary._ “You’re actually the last person I want to meet in a dark alley.”

“I wouldn’t stab you unnecessarily,” says Elektra.

“Of course you wouldn’t.” There’s another mark on the inside of her forearm, about the length and width of Darcy’s thumb, shiny bright. “What about that one?”

“Rope burn when I was fourteen. I made a stupid mistake while climbing.” Elektra rests the very tip of her finger to the skin of Darcy’s shoulder. “What happened here?”

“Shotgun pellet.”

Elektra cocks an eyebrow. “Dick Cheney?”

“ _Castillo_.”

“Ah. And your face?”

“I’m really bad at managing to get out of the way of flying glass.” And flying knives. “There are marks on your back, too.”

She thinks Elektra might throw an innuendo in her face, but instead she shrugs, rolling her shoulders the way a cat does. “I fell through a window while I was working in Singapore. Some of the glass came along for the ride.”

“Ah,” she says. “Funsies.”

“This line of work comes with scars.” Elektra crosses her legs at the knee, swipes a thumb along the edge of her lip to fix her perfect lipstick. “I knew that when I started. If I’m stupid, I’ll die before some of these start fading.”

“Aloe works, apparently.”

Elektra folds her hands up on the counter. “Do you want them to fade? Because I don’t.”

Darcy flexes her fingers. The mark on her hand flares white in the dim lighting. She’s never once put aloe on it, even when she’s covered it for Foggy’s sake. _I don’t want it gone. I want it remembered._

“We should go,” Elektra says. She finishes her tequila. And _Christ,_ all that tequila in less than five minutes, how the hell is she not staggering? “ _Podría robar un arma a uno de esos guardias._ ”

“ _Reglas, Elektra._ ”

“It’s not like I would _use_ it,” she says, but she cracks a little anyway. “Fine.”

“You’d better be right about this.”

“Darling.” She rolls her eyes. “Please. I’m always right.”

“Yeah, whatever,” Darcy says, and slips off her stool. “Dark hallway, show me the forbidden ex-mobster.”

.

.

.

Footsteps scrape across the roof, and he comes awake.

It’s not the first time this has happened, not really. Matt slips out of bed, wishing he’d had more sleep, wishing it was dawn already and people would stop trying to start fights. The suit’s still stiff with sweat when he pulls it on. It’s not the first time he’s caught someone on the roof of their building, or across the street, eyeing the lawyers who brought down Wilson Fisk and looking for a link to the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen. Rising legal stars of the neighborhood, he thinks, with a connection to vigilantes that runs beneath the surface, gets them questions and looks and sidelong stares. It’s not the first time or even the twentieth that someone’s decided to come investigating in the middle of the night, and not the first time or even the twentieth that he goes to deal with it. They just usually have the common decency to not show up on top of a long, long damn day.

A woman, heavy boots and a leather jacket. A blade braced under the fabric of her shirt. And—shit. _Herbs and smoke and leather and speak of the damn devil, Miss Ninja._ Five foot nine, maybe five foot ten, weighted like a dancer with the muscle and the bones. Her heart’s racing as she settles on the edge of the roof, standing with her hands in her pockets, staring out at the city. He thinks for a moment that she might have just—picked this rooftop by accident, that it’s a coincidence. Then she clears her throat, and comes to stand just above the living room, the edges of her boots peeking over the roof. Staring at the billboard, he thinks.

Matt counts the heartbeats of the neighbors. All of them asleep, he thinks. No one walking, no one moving. No one to see. He slips out of the apartment and makes for the fire escape at the other end of the hall.

She doesn’t seem to notice when he swings up onto the rooftop, waits for her to look around. She stands and watches the billboard, hands in her pockets, heartbeat quick but smooth. It’s not sage she smells like, he thinks, but rosemary, for some reason, strong beneath the sweat and the night air. He clears his throat. “Not your neighborhood, Irish.”

She doesn’t turn around. Her heart doesn’t skip. She tips her chin in towards her chest, eyes flicking back and forth, searching the sidewalks. _What is she looking for?_ He draws a stick out of its sheath, spins it in his hand, and taps the edge of the water tower, a clang that makes his teeth buzz, that should catch her attention. Not a shift, not a twitch. He taps again, and a third time, and then finally wets his lips. “Can you hear me?”

The woman shifts her weight, and then turns. Her heart leaps and crashes, breathing snags. She has the knife in her hand before she’s done moving, holding it in a reverse grip, up in front of her like a shield. He doesn’t lower the baton.

“You’re late.” There’s blood crusting on her teeth, and the smell of it puffs into the air when she speaks. “I could’ve killed the pair of them and been out and clear before you even showed.”

“Pair of who?”

“Don’t play games.” She refolds her fingers on the hilt of her knife. “I don’t want to be here any more than you want me here, Devil, but I don’t have a choice.”

“Where’s Brannigan?”

She shakes her head, once, a flick like she’s twitching a fly out of her eyes. “Where’s Lilith?”

“I asked first.”

“I don’t have time for this,” she says. “I didn’t come here to fight you, I came here to warn you. Much as it makes me sick.”

“Hell of a warning, with a knife in the air.”

“This is protection.” She tips the blade at his baton. “You drop yours, I drop mine.”

“Not happening. Where’s Brannigan?”

She curls her free hand up, loosens it again. “I’m not here for him.”

“Then what are you here for?”

“To ask for help,” she says through her teeth. “I wouldn’t if I had any other option, but I’m here, and I’m asking you for help even though I have a thousand reasons to hate you. And I know you don’t believe me, but it’s the truth.”

“I still don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says, but now his heart is the one to skip. “What do you need my help for?”

“The lawyers.” Her throat works. “The people who helped you take down Fisk. Their lives are at risk.”

This is…slightly awkward. “What does Brannigan want with a bunch of lawyers?”

“To get to you,” she says. “Same way Fisk wanted.”

Something in her voice breaks when she says that, something in her shifts, but he can’t make it out before it’s gone. Matt shifts his weight from one foot to the other. “This city doesn’t belong to the Irish anymore. Brannigan will get that through his head sooner or later. You’re going to want to leave before we make that happen.”

“What the hell is it with men and cities?” She shifts her grip on the knife. When she puts her shoulders back, sheathes the dagger, her palms are slick with sweat. She raises both hands. “There. See? Peaceful discussion. I’m not here for Brannigan, I’m here for me.”

“You know where he’s hiding.”

“He’ll probably have moved by the time you get there. I threatened to cut his hand off.”

Matt blinks behind the mask. There are layers to the sweat on her skin, dried and fresh again, and it could be from running, but the tang to it, the way she’s still quivering, just slightly—she’s frightened. Something’s scared her. Blood crusts and cracks on her teeth, her lip. He listens, for a trap, maybe, for a sign, but there’s no one on any of the nearby rooftops, no cameras or equipment that he can pick up. The only weapon she’s carrying is her sheathed knife. He settles the baton back into its place on his thigh, and lifts his own hands, mirroring her. _Hands up_ , like a game of Simon Says. Air shivers in her lungs, and her eyelashes flutter.

“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” she says. She keeps her hands up by her shoulders. “Brannigan’s going to come after them, the lawyers. Nelson, Murdock, and Lewis. You’re the only person in the city that I know for sure wants to keep them safe, so I thought I’d give you a head’s up.”

“Why?”

“They’ve helped you before. You keep people off them, everyone knows that. If anyone can protect them it’s you and Lilith and Hawkeye.”

“No,” he says. “Why warn them? They have nothing to do with you, why want to protect them?”

Another thud from her heart, a skip and a thump like he’s jabbed her with a tire iron. She flexes her fingers. “That’s my business.”

“Seems counterintuitive, if you’re one of Brannigan’s men.”

“I don’t _belong_ to anyone,” she says, wildfire fierce. “I’m not Brannigan’s.”

“You’re the one who said you’re whoever they want you to be.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not. Apparently.” She shoves her hands into her pockets, turns away. “Just—Brannigan’s going to try to use them to get to you. Either get your people somewhere safe, or get your goddamn job done and put the bastard in jail like you do with everyone else, but I don’t have anything more to do with this. I warned you, I’m done.”

When Matt moves, she sways back out of the way. Fluid, he thinks, and spins, lashing out with one foot. Fluid and practiced, like she can predict the moves before he makes them. She keeps her hands in her pockets, steps back, to the side, ducking when he strikes out with a fist, tipping sideways into a gymnastic silhouette when he snaps up off the ground into a spinning kick that nearly knocks them both off the rooftop. Like she knows the moves, he thinks, and she’s falling into the dance. She smacks his fist aside, and says, “I don’t want to fight you, damn you, I just came to give you the warning.”

“Who are you?” he says, and the woman in the leather jacket slaps out at him with one hand, sweat flushing up into the air in a rush of fear that has her heart racing. He catches her wrist. “If you’re not Brannigan’s, who do you work for?”

“Let go of me.” Her voice cracks with frost, and there’s a hint under the rest of her, coffee and something else, familiar— “Let _go_.”

Coffee and Darcy. Coffee and _Darcy_ , faint, barely there, but still just a hint of it, and the coffee, a meeting, she’d said, in Mug Shots two days ago, a meeting with—

“Marisol,” he says, because he’s an idiot, he blurts it out and her eyes flare wide and her breathing stops, for an instant. “You’re Marisol Guerra.”

She knees him in the stomach. He barely manages to shift back enough to keep the air from being knocked out of him, but it _hurts_ , a knee right to the solar plexus, and his fingers get just loose enough that she wrenches out of his grip. “Stay away from me,” she says, high and thin. “You _stay the hell away from me,_ Devil.”

“Wait—”

She bolts off the rooftop, and he doesn’t chase her. Matt puts a hand to his stomach, tries to breathe properly over the ache in the muscle, and undoes the lock on the roof access door.

_I shouldn’t have woken up._

.

.

.

It’s not as hard as Darcy thinks it’ll be to get past the two guards at the top of the hallway. “We’re here on behalf of Finn Brannigan,” Elektra says, her accent shifting from posh French to sharp Irish with the same kind of nonchalance she’d used with knives, and the bodyguards look at each other before one turns away to chatter into his walkie-talkie in heavy Brooklynese. The one on the left gives Darcy a lingering look, and holy hell, she wants her mask right now.

“You weren’t expected.”

Elektra reaches out with two fingers, taps him under the chin. “We never are, darling. Still, I can promise you Mr. Stone will be very disappointed if he doesn’t talk to us.”

“You’ve been at the bar for the past ten minutes.”

“Waiting for the club to clear out a bit.” She rolls her eyes. “If you’d rather us go, we can, but Mr. Brannigan won’t be best pleased, and neither will Mr. Stone, and it won’t fall on _our_ heads, will it, Lizzy, darling?”

“No.” She drags Ireland out of her instead of Atlanta at the last possible second, almost fumbles and steadies out again. “No, won’t be us. We’re doing what we’re supposed to.”

“Pat us down if you like,” Elektra says. “No wires, no weapons, just a few words and a nice drink and then we’ll be off.”

“No harm.” Darcy knocks her head into Elektra’s shoulder. “Not if we get to do what we came here for, anyway. And if he doesn’t want to see us, we’ll be on our way.”

The one on the walkie-talkie clips it back onto his belt. “Why the shades?”

“Would you believe that I can burn your brain out with my eyes?” Darcy says.

“Fucking mutants.” Walkie-Talkie guy jerks his head. “Stone says you can go back.”

Elektra lifts her arms, indolent, the picture of a satisfied cat. To his credit, the pat-down Left-Hand Guard gives her is actually a pat-down and not a petting, perfunctory more than anything. When he moves to Darcy, she lifts her arms too, and shakes her hair back out of her eyes while he runs his hands down her legs, over her ribs. “Clean,” he says, after a moment, and Elektra hooks her arm through Darcy’s elbow, lifting both eyebrows.

“Told you, we’re only here to talk.” She turns to Darcy, puts her mouth to the curve of her ear. “Keep your head down for the cameras.”

Darcy makes herself smile like Elektra’s made a joke, and lets her hair fall forward to hide her face.

“You want the door on the end,” Left-Hand Guard says. “He’s waiting.”

“Brilliant.” There’s a press of cold metal against the inside of Darcy’s elbow, and _shit, she stole his keys, holy fuck,_ how did she even manage that? “Be out in a minute, darlings.”

The door closes behind them with a snap.

It’s brighter, in the hallway. Actual lights instead of mood bulbs. Dark walls and a tile floor and three doors, one at the end, one on either side. _Tile and dark paint, good for hiding bloodstains,_ but this place doesn’t smell like bleach, it smells like air freshener and bad cologne. The door on the right is marked with the word _Maintenance_ , the other two blank. _If the one at the end is Silke’s office, then either one of these could be the A/V room._ Or something else entirely, but she really, really doubts that a guy who’s worked as an FBI mole would be the sort to start some kind of drug or trafficking venture through the back of his legal (gross but still legal) nightclub.

“At least it doesn’t stink of marijuana back here,” she says, still in the Irish accent—Dublin, maybe, something that’s more cobbled together from watching _Downton Abbey_ than anything—and Elektra snorts. In the brightness of the fresh lighting, the little red mask hooked around the base of her throat looks like a necklace of blood.

“Don’t visit the Netherlands, then.”

“Wasn’t planning on it.” She palms the keys Elektra’s stolen, and shoves them into the pocket of her jeans without a word. There are three of them, judging by the feel, one shorter and sharper than the others like it belongs to a safety deposit box or something, and the clip gleams gold against her skin in the moment before she shoves them out of sight. “I’m fine here.”

“Suit yourself.” Elektra cracks her wrist, and raps twice on the door at the end of the hall. “It’s quite beautiful there.”

“Pot smoke makes my head hurt.”

“As you say.”

There’s an audible click of a lock, and her heart leaps. The man who opens the door is a carbon copy of Right-Hand Guard, a twin or a brother, who knows, and he steps aside to let them cross into the plush office. The floors in here, they’re all heavy wood, and there’s an honest to god bookshelf against the far wall like Samuel Silke is a _James Bond_ villain. A small bookshelf, and it’s full of DVDs instead of books, but, y’know, the thought counts.

Samuel Silke is a tall man, and thin, with glasses slipping down his nose. Maybe forty, if Darcy had to judge, hairline creeping back from his forehead and his ears, the curls thinning on top like threaded cotton. The heater is on full blast full blast in here, and Silke’s shirt (aptly, made of silk) is sticking to his skin, sweat ringing the collar. The poor bodyguard is having a much worse time, in his full suit. Silke steps away from his desk, and his eyes flick from Elektra to Darcy and back again, his brows creeping up his forehead. “Brannigan sent you,” he says. “What for?”

“Well, this is cozy.” Elektra traipses her fingers down the edge of the desk, breaks away from Darcy to peer at one of the paintings on the wall. Darcy shifts her weight, watches the bodyguard out of the corner of her eye. There’s a camera, she thinks, in the upper right-hand corner of the room, and when she turns so her hair falls in front of her eyes Silke snaps his attention to her, lips going thin. “Is the mirror one-way?”

“It’s a mirror,” Silke says.

“Doesn’t mean you can’t have fun with it.” She raps on the wall. “Especially in a soundproofed room.”

“What Siobhan’s trying to ask,” Darcy says, and Elektra snaps her a _what the fuck_ look, but it’s the first name that came into her head, okay, Siobhan’s an Irish name, she’s like ninety percent sure, _so stop judging me, Natchios, when you’re calling me fucking Lizzy,_ “is if we’re being observed, Mr. Stone. We came to talk business, not to get arrested.”

“Still don’t know what kind of business Finn Brannigan has with me.” Silke rubs his hands on the tops of his jeans. “The man’s been out of New York for nearly fifteen years.”

“Yeah, well, he’s back.” Darcy hooks her nails into her hair, scruffs her fingers through it. “He’s looking to take part of his territory back, and your club’s in a good place. He’d be willing to front money for its upkeep if you’d just—help him, on and off.”

“It’s a cute accent, for sure, but how do I know that—”

“If you’d really rather not hear his offer,” Elektra says, and snags what looks like a sphere of pure rose quartz off the top of Silke’s desk, rolling it between her palms, “then that’s no skin off of our noses. Might be for you, but we’ve done our jobs.”

“Of course, it _is_ a one-time-only thing, but that’s your problem, Mr. Stone, not ours.” Darcy holds out a hand, and Elektra turns, reaching back. “We can go, if we’re in the way.”

“He’ll be disappointed,” Elektra says, “but there’s nothing for it, really.”

“Whoa, okay, hold up—” Silke shoves his glasses up his nose. “All I’m asking for is some proof that—”

Elektra digs her nails into the back of Darcy’s hand. It’s her only warning. She slings the ball of quartz directly at the camera, striking it dead in the eye and shattering it. By the time the thing crunches into bits, Elektra’s already dragged the baton from the guard’s belt and whipped it into the soft places beneath his ribs. The guard makes a noise like a wounded bear, and lashes out, but Darcy can’t watch; Silke’s opened his mouth, gone to shout, scrabbled back away from them— _panic button_ , she thinks, _a cry for help_ , _no—_ and she moves _._ Darcy’s on him before he gets more than three feet across the room, drives her heel hard into the back of his knee, and his chin clips the edge of his desk as he goes down, splitting. Blood spatters the wood. She snags him by his thinning hair, whacks his head once against the top of his desk, and when he rebounds, Darcy has his arm twisted up behind his back and a penknife to the base of his neck. She’s not going to stab him, obviously, but for fuck’s sake, he doesn’t know that, and if she doesn’t, he’s going to scream. _I wish I had my taser, right now._ There’s a scuffling sound behind them, and then a slam, and the bodyguard’s on the ground. “Christ,” Elektra says, in her normal voice. “That was much less interesting than I thought it was going to be.”

Silke heaves.

“Don’t you dare puke,” Darcy says. Lilith sings under her skin. “Don’t you _dare_ , Silke.”

“You hit him too hard.”

“At least he’s still conscious.” She tugs a little on Silke’s hair. “Hi, keep your eyes open. I wanted to talk to you about something.”

“ _Christ_.” Silke swallows, over and over. “How the hell did you find me, they said that—”

“I’m very good,” says Elektra.

“Whatever Brannigan wants, he can have, I signed out of this life years ago, I don’t—”

“Idiot,” says Elektra. “You really think Brannigan would send women as anything other than a prize for a job well done?”

“Which is revolting in its own way,” says Darcy.

“Completely.”

“The fuck is wrong with you, bitch,” Silke says, and Darcy jams the penknife hard into the back of his neck. It cuts skin, not enough to bleed, just enough to sting, and he whimpers and shuts up.

“Don’t be boring, Mr. Silke.” Elektra scoops the quartz ball off the ground, out of the circle of broken glass, and passes it between her hands. “ _Bitch_ this and _whore_ that and it’s exhausting, truly.”

“Lady has a point.” Darcy presses Silke harder into the desktop. “Had some questions, Mr. Silke. Do me a favor, don’t scream.”

“Whatever you want, you can take it—”

“Why do you people always think it’s money,” says Darcy, and yeah, there it goes, Lilith creeping forward, rolling smooth and sweet. “You always, always, always think it’s money, and I really couldn’t give less of a damn.”

Silke goes beastly still underneath her.

“Really.” Elektra sprawls sideways across his chair, legs over the arm, slinky and pleased with herself. She throws the quartz ball from hand to hand. “We just have a few questions, Mr. Silke, and then we’ll let you go.”

“Lilith,” says Silke. “And—”

“None of your business,” Elektra says.

“My friend and I don’t have a lot of time.” Darcy pushes, leans, rests her weight on him, and he’s bigger than her, taller than her, heavier, probably, too, but the knife pricks cold into the back of his neck and he doesn’t move an inch. “I wanna take a trip down memory lane with you, Mr. Silke—you remember Daniel Larkspur? Of course you do, I hear you two were buddies.”

His throat works. “Larks is dead, has been for years.”

“I don’t care about Larks, I care about the people he killed.”

“You’re the ones asking about Willie Lincoln.”

“Bravo,” says Elektra. She tips her head back, shuts her eyes like she’s modeling. “Ten out of ten, Samuel. You threw a double-back and stuck the landing.”

“I didn’t kill Lincoln,” says Silke, and squeezes his eyes shut. “I didn’t, that was Larks—”

“I don’t care who, I care why.”

“It was fifteen years ago, nobody gives a shit about some dead—”

She wrenches, twisting his arm up high enough that she can feel it shaking, feel the tension. “You say one more word and I break your arm.”

“Larks wanted Lincoln dead to get his hands on Lincoln’s jobs, according to our good friend Caesar Cicero, but here’s the thing, Mr. Silke—that smells like bullshit to me. Don’t you think, Lilith?”

“Extreme levels of bullshit,” says Darcy, and twists his wrist until it creaks under her palm. “One might say apocalyptic.”

“My arm—”

“I wouldn’t move, you’ll dislocate your shoulder if you do.”

Silke shifts, just enough for the joint to creak. He stops moving.

“Why did Larks want Lincoln dead?”

“What the hell does it matter, it was fifteen years ago, let me _go_ , you—”

 _Right, then,_ she thinks, and yanks. The shoulder pops out of joint neat as a nut from a hubcap, and when Silke screams, she leans in, and whispers right in his ear. “Try again.”

“It was a job, it was a job, he was doing someone a favor—”

“A favor?” Elektra crosses her legs at the ankle. “A favor for who?”

“Christ—”

“Oh,” Darcy says. “Look. Fingers. How many fingers do you need to run a club, E?”

“That depends on how good a club it is.” Elektra rolls the ball in her palm, and cocks an eyebrow at her. _E? Darcy, what the hell, where did that even come from?_ “For this one, probably only two. What’s your personal best at words-per-minute, Mr. Silke? Or maybe you don’t type at all, maybe you have a secretary for that. Better pay them well, you’ll need them.”

“And there’s always the elbow, after, and the wrist.” She flips the penknife. “And if I put this in the right place, severed tendons, that’s a bitch and a half to fix. If we’re talking bitches.”

“Really is a pity you soundproofed this place,” Elektra says. “Your men would’ve heard you scream by now if you hadn’t.” She bares her teeth. “Give me the knife, we can test it.”

“You sure? Blood won’t come out of that shirt.”

“I’m willing to sacrifice it to the cause.”

“Christ—” Silke’s cheek is damp. “ _Fisk_ , it was a favor for Fisk, Fisk wanted Lincoln dead, Jesus Christ, let me go, please—”  

Darcy fists her hand up in his hair, pulls his head away from the desk. “Fisk? Why would Fisk want Lincoln dead, why not get Lincoln on his side?”

“Lincoln and Rigoletto were buddies, Fisk never would have been able to turn him against the guy and he needed to get close to Rigoletto to kill him and take—”

“Rigoletto didn’t die until last year.” Elektra ties her hair up. “Lincoln was murdered fifteen years ago. Try again.”

“If you’re not inclined we can always start with thumbs,” Darcy says.

“ _Shit_ ,” says Silke, and scrunches his eyes shut. “Jesus Christ, Fisk couldn’t get as close to Rigoletto as he wanted with Lincoln in the way, with Lincoln gone Fisk had more power, he could get into Rigoletto’s inner circle, he could—”

“What?”

Silke keens in the back of his throat. “My arm—”

“ _What could he do_?”

“He could get the kid,” Silke says. “Fisk wanted Lincoln out of the way so he could get to Rigoletto and he took Lincoln’s daughter, only Larks ever knew, Larks wasn’t supposed to tell me but—”

Darcy slams his head into the desk hard enough to break his nose, and lets him slip to the floor. There’s blood smeared on her hands, between her fingers. Somehow, he’s still conscious. For a second, in her head, there’s Grotto, bloody, terrified Grotto, Grotto settled in broken glass and darkness. “Why the little girl, why take her, what would Fisk want with a child—”

“Lincoln was a mutant.” Elektra crouches near Darcy’s feet, still passing the quartz ball back and forth, back and forth. Silke spits blood onto the floor. “He could take on whatever form he wanted, couldn’t he? That’s how he could get in and out of all his jobs so easily.”

“You could’ve mentioned that before,” Darcy says.

“I’m mentioning it now.”

“Lincoln was a mutant.” Silke wipes blood off his chin, rests his head to the front of the desk. “Lincoln was a mutant, his wife was a mutant, anyone close to Rigoletto knew that—”

“Long-term investment.” Elektra’s lips go thin as paper. “Sounds like Fisk.”

She’s going to be ill. Darcy bites her tongue. _Her fiancé’s in prison,_ Marisol had said. _Her fiancé. You could call him a dad, in some ways._ “If you’re making this up, Silke—”

“I’m not, I’m not, he had the will modified and everything, Larks told me, Fisk went in and had one of his pet lawyers fake Lincoln’s will so the guardianship of the little girl went to his housekeeper and her husband, the Guerras—”

 _The Guerras work for him, and he was always around after my dad died._ “Have you told anyone else this?”

“Fisk would’ve killed me if it came out.” There are great shiny smears over his cheeks, down his chin. Snot and sweat and tears. “He’d have killed me, I didn’t—”

“Didn’t stop you from acting as an informant,” says Elektra. Silke shakes his head.

“That’s different, that’s work, you don’t fuck with Fisk about his family, you think Anatoly Ranskahov had it bad, you have no idea—” 

_I just wondered how you felt about him. Or what you thought._

Enough. She can’t hear this anymore. Darcy seizes a book off the top of the desk, and clips him across the face. Silke hits the ground with a smack, and goes still. Breathing, at least. Bleeding from the broken nose and a split lip, his shoulder and arm torqued awkwardly out of the socket, but breathing, and alive. And staying that way, she thinks. Breathing and alive and staying that way.

“Damn.” Elektra pockets the penknife, and drops down into the desk chair. “Bitter much?”

“Fuck.” Her lungs can’t hold air. “Fucking—Fisk. Fucking _Fisk_.”

“What else do you expect?”

_Her fiancé’s in prison. Vanessa. Vanessa and Fisk. And Marisol. And she was in my office, she—_

The glass is in her hand and flying before she realizes she’s grabbed it. It shatters in flecks of crystal, bursting, and Elektra cocks an eyebrow at her. “Temper.”

 _Fisk made a lot of mistakes, but maybe—maybe the core of what he was trying to do wasn’t necessarily bad._ “She _lied_ —”

“Lock it down, Lilith.”

“She’s Fisk’s, she’s been Fisk’s the whole time, what the fuck was the _point_ —”

“ _Stop_ ,” says Elektra in a voice like lightning. Darcy screeches through her teeth, and kicks the desk. “You were looking into this for her, weren’t you? For the girl.”

“She _lied_ —”

“Stop and _think_ ,” Elektra snaps. “It’s not as if she had a choice in Fisk taking her in.”

 _But she lied_. Darcy wants to scream, _I’ve been lied to too many times by too many people and I can’t do it anymore, I can’t, not again, it was getting better, it was getting_ better _, if she’s Fisk’s and she keeps coming back to the firm then Fisk isn’t—_ She bites her tongue, dances away from that. She is _not_ going to have a meltdown in front of Elektra Natchios. She is _absolutely not doing that._

_She lied and she was a child and she’s one of Fisk’s people and she keeps turning up and asking why, why would—_

“Hah,” says Elektra, and she snaps out of it. “Of course he uses his middle name as a password. I can wipe the system, clear out any back-ups so there’s no footage left. You want me to save anything before I do?”

Darcy looks down at Silke. “No sense in leaving any evidence we were here.”

“Reasons why I’m taking this quartz,” says Elektra, and gets to work.

.

.

.

Elektra watches until Lilith’s vanished back into her building—Matthew’s building, her building, their building, any of the above—before she turns and starts for uptown. She’d been somewhat serious about the moving thing, though to be honest she’s not going to be here long enough to require a new place to live. She just doesn’t like the apartment that the Natchioses left her, doesn’t feel at home there. It’s sharp the way she likes, but there are too many memories of being trapped in a family she didn’t like and a city she didn’t want. The property’s on the market, and she’s only living in it until someone else takes it, but (she slings around a corner and drops, tucks and rolls and pops back up on the next rooftop) it does make some kind of sense to maintain a bolthole in Manhattan. If things become strictly necessary. This is, after all, where the Hand is making its move.

 _Kill Kate Bishop. Take her building. Dig their damn hole._ For what? For the Black Sky? Why would the Black Sky require a hole? _They exist in shadow and mysticism; whatever old legend they’re following probably has no basis in reality._ But they follow it anyway, Nobu’s people, Nobu’s men. _For a man who seems so disinclined to follow tradition, he sinks into myth with all his teeth, and he drags his section of the Hand down with him._

_If Lewis is frightened of a piece of graffiti, how is she going to be when she learns Nobu’s alive?_

Unhelpful. Possibly self-destructive. Possibly vengeful. Possibly cold. She’s not sure anymore. She’s not even sure she wants Lilith to _know_ that Nobu’s alive. If she went rogue, it would be…incredibly difficult, to say the least. She’d probably drag Matthew off the rails with her, and then all of Elektra’s backup would be scuppered. _Fear isn’t all that logical_ , she’d said. _It just kind of happens and you deal with it._

_Fear or terror?_

The apartment uptown had been purchased—not rented, but _purchased_ , and the part of her that will always be Ellie in the Xinjiang complex winces at the thought of it—on behalf of Christina Natchios, when she’d been dabbling in New York markets, but so far as Elektra knows Christina herself never visited the place. Hugo may have, once or twice, but when she’d claimed it for her work at Columbia it had been, for the most part, untouched. It still seems to carry traces of them, angles and sharp edges that jar with hers. _Windows that big are just an invitation_ , she thinks, and levers the mask up over her head, tossing it onto the standing bar in the kitchen. _For a sniper or a peeping tom, either way._

She’s been expecting the phone to ring for the past two days, but it’s only once she’s showered, snagged her tablet, and settled on a barstool with a second glass of Mescal that it finally does. _Unknown number,_ and there’s only ever one unknown number that calls her, anyway. She swipes the screen, taps speaker phone. “You took your time.”

“I had international travel to deal with.”

She can’t decide if the thump of her guts is sickened or elated. _Don’t,_ she thinks. _Don’t come here, not yet, you’ll ruin it. It’s far too fragile._ Elektra schools her voice to casual indifference. “Are you already here, then?”

“No,” Stick says. “And I won’t be anytime soon, unless they get a hell of a lot more active than they’ve been lately. You’ve been poking them with a stick, Ellie. The Hand’s buzzing all over Europe.”

“Of course they are,” she says. She swipes through into her encrypted email, and starts downloading the footage from the Pearl. (Yes, she did delete it. No, she didn’t delete it until she’d zipped the folders together and mailed them to herself. No sense in not keeping a card up her sleeve, if Samuel Silke gets antsy.) “I was tempted to hit them with dynamite, but apparently, the local law enforcement won’t tolerate it.”

“Matty gets weird about explosions.”

She gives that the response it deserves, and scoffs.

“You gonna tell me why you’re pokin’ your nose into the Maggia, Elektra?” A horn blares on Stick’s end. Not American. Possibly English. It sounds English. “Doesn’t seem like your game.”

“It’s something I’m looking into, that’s all. It’s not like I have anything else to do while I’m waiting for people to spit names at me.” She taps a bit too hard at the screen, and jars her nail. “Roxxon won’t let me back in their doors, anyway.”

“Like you give a shit about Roxxon.”

“It’s still my money.” She muses. “I’m about ready to just reappropriate the funds through electronic means. Not as though I haven’t done it before.”

“Roxxon wasn’t your only chore in New York,” says Stick. “You know that.”

“Yes, well. That’s become considerably more complicated than advertised.”

“You used to enjoy a challenge.”

“I used,” says Elektra, watching the percentages tick by, “to be incredibly stupid.”

Stick’s quiet, the kind of thoughtful quiet that means he’s turning over all the angles of something in his head, finding a flaw to chip at until the whole stone cracks. “We can’t afford to have him distracted. I trained him for the fight as much as I trained you.”

 _For less time,_ she wants to spit. _For much less time, without ever telling him why._ “Yes, well. He’s not going to stop being distracted until the Castle case is done.” Elektra draws her knee up against her chest. “There’s not much I can do about that.”

“Other than be more distracting than the case.”

“Maybe in another circumstance he’d fall for that, but not with this. He’s not—” She gropes for a word. “He isn’t alone, Stick. He has backup, he has people who know—”

Stick snaps to attention. “People?”

“I can’t know for sure.” But she has her suspicions. The blonde secretary who had turned spitty and dangerous as soon as she’d dropped a line about bruises; Nelson, who’d been walking on coals the moment she’d entered the office; they both know. Maybe others, considering how freely Lilith shares herself with the world. “He’s not alone, he’s not spiraling. He’s not going to be easy to snag, not the way you think. Neither is she.”

The English horn comes again, and then an announcer over a PA system. The Waterloo line, she thinks. Some London station. Stick says, “I wasn’t aware we were working on snagging her, too.”

“One comes with the other at this point,” says Elektra, woodenly. “Besides, she’s been helpful. Unexpectedly, but she has been. It would be illogical not to bring her in as well.”

“Really.”

“I did her a favor, she’ll do me one. It’s a balance.”  

Stick goes quiet in a way she’s hated since she was a child, too small to really, truly know how dangerous he was, and is, and will be, this man who’d snatched her off the streets of Paris with the words _talented_ and _home_ and _safe._ _I’ve been looking for you for a while,_ he’d said, and she’d been so small she hadn’t questioned it, really. Especially not since he’d stolen her knife. He goes quiet, and he waits, and Elektra stands it for as long as she can before she has to start drumming her fingernails against the countertop.

“Be careful, Ellie,” he says.

“Of what?”

“Getting distracted yourself.”

“I’m not an idiot.” Elektra swings her leg back and forth, not looking away from the tablet. “I know what I’m doing.”

“You never seem to know what you’re doing where Matty’s concerned.”

“I’m not dealing with Matthew, not directly.”

“Is that wise?”

“He’s being recalcitrant. Until I get Lilith on my side, that’s a dead end.”  

“What happened to _I don’t need her help_?”

“You don’t need to be petty,” says Elektra. Ninety percent, ninety five, and then it’s downloaded. Hundreds of hours of footage to parse through, lord. A great deal of it she can fast forward through, but there might be a few things that wind up interesting. “And like I said, one comes with the other. Getting Matthew alone isn’t an option anymore.”

“It is if you try hard enough.”

“You don’t understand.” She pushes the tablet away. “It’s _not an option_. He’s paranoid about even speaking to me after what happened at the Yakatomi Building. I don’t know if she’s given him some kind of ultimatum or if he’s avoiding me because of his own reasons, but Lilith is the way in here, now, not Matthew.”

Stick’s quiet. Elektra turns down the volume on her tablet, starts playing the video.

“You’re not on the ground here, Stick. I am. That’s my call. Both, or you’ll get neither.”

“You call her Lilith now,” Stick says.

Something about how he says it, the tone, flat, emotionless, makes her heart skip. Elektra hits fast forward, watches bodies fling themselves around Samuel Silke’s office, vanish out the door and reappear like ants. “It’s who she is.”

“You used to call her Lewis,” he says. “Or Darcy.”

“What does it matter what I call her?”

“Just wondering at the shift.”

 _Darcy Lewis is what she’s called,_ she thinks. _Lilith is what she is._ But she doesn’t think that’s what Stick wants to hear at all. “It’s easier.”

“You call her that in public?”

“When I can get away with it.”

“This thing,” he says, “with the Maggia—that for her?”

“To get her trust,” she says, and there’s her temper spiraling, snapping between her teeth. “If there’s something you’re trying to say—”

“Nothing in particular.” Another blaring horn. “Just figured you’d still want her dead.”

Something brittle and sour cracks open in her throat. Her stomach churns. “I know what I’m doing, Stick.”

“You usually do,” he says. “Call me when you have something.”

She hangs up without saying goodbye. Elektra bounces her leg, over and over and over, staring at the screen, at the timestamp and the flickering light. Then she flings herself off the chair, and heads for the bag she has hanging in her room. She won’t run, not in daylight, but she can at least hit something for a while. It’ll take the edge off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Translation:
> 
> “So did you really want to wing it or do you have some kind of plan?”  
> Elektra’s eyes go sharp. “And suddenly we’re being secretive in Spanish?”  
> “Yes.” Darcy[...] eyes the guy at the counter again. “Pretty sure no one in here is going to keep track of more than three words of this.”  
> “You can’t know that for sure.”  
> “Elektra, they’re hipsters. They don’t speak Spanish, they just put sugar skulls on T-shirts and pretend they’re not committing cultural larceny.” She clears her throat, and says, loudly, “The man to my left smells like he just crawled out of a sewer and he should swim with electric eels.”  
> “Hey, gorgeous, you Mexican?” 
> 
> Darcy rolls her eyes. “Great.”  
> “You’re a bitter little thing, aren’t you? He’s an idiot, that’s all.”  
> “I don’t care if he’s an idiot.”
> 
> “The club will be closed in forty minutes, more than likely. We don’t have a lot of time to mess around with this.”  
> “If starting a fight is absolutely out of the question—”  
> “It is.”  
> “Then we pretend.”  
> “What, just walk right in like we own the place?”  
> “Works more often than not, darling. You can get anything you like done if you act like you know what you’re doing."
> 
> “Are you sure there aren’t any cameras in here?”  
> “In here? No. As for the ones they have in the back, I have a way to fix that.”
> 
> “If we’re going to do this, we might as well start now, don’t you think?”  
> “Wait for three minutes. Rushing can ruin it just as easily as being too slow.”
> 
> "I could steal a gun from one of these guards.”  
> “Rules, Elektra.”
> 
>  
> 
> If you guys were going to read another verse from me, would you want Darcy-as-a-member-of-the-Chaste D/E or D/M X Files AU?


	15. Ipso Ergo Facto

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A _lot_ of plot this chapter and a _lot_ of threads that I've been weaving together finally falling into place so yay, that's why it took so long. XD
> 
> Content warnings: misogynist slurs (thanks, Brannigan), depression, anxiety, PTSD, self-blame, psychological bullshit that really ought to be dealt with (Karen, Darcy, I'm looKING RIGHT AT YOU BOTH), discussion of gaslighting (Maya does not deserve this shit), discussion of murder, discussion of emotional manipulation/abuse, actual murder, gunshots (specifically headshots; also, flashbacks to Wesley), blood, description of drugs (crack), some mention of the terrible racist nature of the US justice system, and bad jokes about ducks.

Karen stands by the water with Rey at her knee, and watches the sun come up.

When they’d been younger, before he’d died, she and Kevin used to compete at Nintendo 64 games. Super Mario, Star Wars, Captain Falcon, Sonic. Kevin couldn’t stand _The Legend of  Zelda_ , for reasons she’s never been able to grasp, but _Majora’s Mask_ had been her favorite. Considering how many people around her wear masks, now, it seems a little prophetic, but at the time she’d spent hours sneaking the system out of the cupboard in the middle of the night to play while her parents slept. _Majora’s Mask_ had been a boy’s game, after all, bought for Kevin and not for her. It never changed how much she loved it, but she still gets an illicit thrill from the soundtrack popping up on her iPod, or when she has the time to sprawl on Jen’s couch and fiddle with the port to the 3DS. _A secret._ Secret things.

_Dawn of the Third Day. Twenty-four hours remain._

She can’t really put off going to see Frank for one more day. Not that Angie has come back with anything, even after Jen had given her some places to look. “It’s n-not as though she t-told me she was planning on doing anything like this,” Jen had said, sourly. “She knew to keep stuff like this away from me. Tower’s—flexible. I’m not.”

Ben, coiled around his café latte, had muttered something that sounded roughly like “You’re telling me.”

“Reyes has probably already hidden the files,” says Jen. “She’s had time since I left, and she’s not stupid. She’ll have either destroyed them or hidden them so d-deep that no one could find them.”

“Except me,” says Angie. “I’ve been around. I know all the nooks and crannies.”

“Except Angie,” Jen had said, and patted Angie’s shoulder in a soothing sort of way. Hei Hei had long since shifted from Angie’s shoulder to curl his tail around Jen’s neck, gnawing on a piece of mango that Angie had produced from a Tupperware inside her purse. Clearly, this is a regular occurrence at Carvel’s, because nobody had commented once on the golden tamarin peeking out from under Jen’s hair. (She’s fairly sure that Ben’s eyes had fallen out of his head at the sight of Jen Walters in a tank top and with her hair down. Half the café had, for good reason. Holy shit, Jen, _shoulders_. And arms. Karen had kind of been aware of the shoulders and arms, but there’s a difference between seeing them when your roommate is sitting next to you on the couch reading a legal brief and seeing them in their full glory in sunlight and daytime and, you know, _public._ ) “But Reyes is going to be suspicious if it happens too many times, Angie, you know th-that much.”

“Whatever, toucan.” Angie leans back into her chair. “I can fight Empress Cixi if I have to, she’d probably snap like a twig if I smacked her hard enough. Woodpecker would be the problem.”

“Woodpecker,” Ben says.

“ADA Tower,” Karen says, and adds sugar to her coffee.

“Bet he loves that.”

“I’m n-not sure he knows,” says Jen.

“What about the other sources you have in the DA’s office, Ben?” Karen sweeps the swizzle stick around in her coffee mug. “Not that I’m casting any aspersions on what Angie can manage, I’m not stupid—”

“Thank you,” says Angie.

“But if there’s someone else in the DA’s office who might not be under so much suspicion for being so openly affiliated with Jen, then they might be able to get something that Angie can’t go near.” She shrugs. “Just a thought.”

“I’d rather not ask them to help unless we have no other choice,” says Ben. “Their position’s precarious.”

“Like they’re about to lose their j-job?”

“Something like that.” Ben cuts a look to Angie. “Why birds?”

Angie had fixed him with a flat stare. “Something wrong with birds, condor?”

Ben had stared back, for a moment, before fixing his glasses. “Remind me to introduce you to my wife,” he says. “Doris would like you.”

(Karen’s still not sure that Doris and Angie wouldn’t just take over the world if they were in the same room, especially if Jen were involved, but that’s irrelevant.)

When the dawn breaks over the edge of the city, it turns all the skyscrapers into blazing mirrors. Her eyes water. Karen looks down at the dog at her hip, curls her hand around the leash. Rey’s settled on her haunches a long time ago, tongue lolling out of her mouth as she sniffs at the air. Nobody here bothers her with Rey around. It’s actually fairly impressive. She can count on one hand the number of times she’s been catcalled since she started taking Rey around with her at night, and no one’s tried to follow her in a week. Saves her from having to flash the .380, though she still keeps it in her purse. It also means she doesn’t have to lie in wait in an alley to break someone’s nose, which is also something she’s done in the past year.  She hadn’t considered that, when she’d volunteered to take Rey on, but it’s…it’s not that she feels safer, it’s that she feels steadier. She’s not alone on her walks, anymore.

“What do you think,” she says, and Rey clamps her jaw shut to look up at her. “We go back?”

Rey blinks a few times, and turns to sniff at the chain link fence again.

“Five minutes?”

No answer from Rey, but then again, none was expected. Her tail dusts the concrete a few times, though. Karen shoves her other hand deeper into her pocket where she keeps the gun, and settles her fingers around the grip. No one’s around, really, but—still.

This, she thinks: this is where she threw Wesley’s gun into the water. Or not this exact point, but maybe a dozen yards further north. They’ve put up a chain link fence since then, but this is where she’d staggered and where she’d tensed and flung the thing out into the sea. The gun’s probably rusted, now, wrecked. Her fingerprints long gone. The warehouse where she’d woken up is two buildings down. She comes back here almost as a dare to herself, or a punishment, either way, returning to murder over and over again in a sick, boomeranging way. She’d never called Darcy out to this spot, in particular, but all of the waterfront counts, for her. These are the bloody spots she can never wash off her hands, gunpowder ground deep under her skin, all of it caught in the concrete shoreline, the warehouses and the chain link and the sea. If hell exists, she thinks, and her parents are right and it’s different for every person who enters, then this will be hers. Dark water and clouds and cold hands. An injection and a gun.

But hell _is_ real, isn’t it? She’s seen hell this year, last year, and before. She’d seen hell in a car accident on a narrow deserted highway; she’d seen hell in her first city apartment, waking up with a knife in her hands and blood slick between her fingers and Daniel Fisher’s body sprawled on her carpet; she’d seen hell in Matt’s face when Darcy had been taken by Nobu, in Foggy’s eyes in Josie’s after they’d all fought, in Jen’s silences and Elena’s muttering and Darcy hitting a concrete wall over and over again, her knuckles torn and smeared with red. She sees it, still, in a hospital bed, painted up the thin pale walls of a room that’s kept locked and a man kept strapped down. _Hell is real. We live in it._

Three days. They’d asked for three days. This is the third day. She’s not entirely sure when she started thinking about the deadline, or if she’d ever _stopped_ thinking about the deadline, but it’s been three days, Matt and Darcy have had no luck finding Brannigan, and she can’t avoid going to see Frank forever. They need intel from him, the details need to be hashed out. Karen reaches out, hooks her fingers through the chain link. They need intel and they need to be honest with him, since nobody’s been honest with Frank Castle since he woke up. If Brannigan is still a threat, then Frank needs to know that. He deserves to know that. He _does_.

“Maybe I’m naïve,” she says to Rey. “You think he’ll go running after Brannigan?”

Rey scuffs her tail over the concrete again.

“Yeah.” Karen knocks her head to the fence. “I do too.”

She’s not an idiot. Frank’s coiled, right now. The lack of information means he’s come to a standstill. The instant—the _instant_ he hears something, the instant he knows, he’ll be up and out the door the first chance he gets. She _knows_ that, and she knows the chaos that will result in, and she knows what happened the last time Daredevil and Lilith had gone after the Punisher, she knows how dangerous it was and how bad it became and how it nearly wrecked everything, but she can’t lie to Frank Castle. She _can’t_ lie to Frank Castle. Frank’s never once lied to her, in the weeks since this started, even when he had cause, even when anyone else would have. He’s never once lied. She’s not going to turn around and repay that with lies of her own.

_Like you’re so good at telling the truth anyway, Karen._

And would it be so bad if Brannigan _did_ wind up dead? The link cuts cold into her fingers. Would it be so terrible if Smiling Finn Brannigan wound up like the rest of his family, like the other murderers and the other rapists and the other men that Frank killed—because there’s no question that he killed them, absolutely none. Would it be so fucking awful, she thinks, staring at the water, if Finn Brannigan turned up with a hole in his head?

If she said that aloud—Christ. Foggy would probably never speak to her again. Matt—Matt  would be disappointed, she thinks. Matt has the turn of mind to split hairs between killing someone in defense, and killing someone in revenge. Either way, someone dies, but the motivation—he’d be furious with her for that, the thought that anyone has the right to _execute_ anybody, that this kind of counter-systemic devastation is something she could agree with. That the pure, unadulterated, personalized _vengeance_ of it is something she could agree with. Punishment is one thing. Vengeance is something else entirely. She’d refused to think about it for so long after Wesley, but Matt, and Foggy, and even Jen to some degree, they don’t know her very well. They don’t know what she’s done, and she’d kept it from them for a reason, she _knows_ they’d loathe her for it, but after the past few weeks—

_Are you trying to think of a way to describe this guy that isn’t crazy or psycho or murderer?_

—it’s pretty clear they don’t know her very well at all.

Foggy would be confused and furious, if she said anything. Matt would be disappointed and furious. Jen—Jen would just be disappointed. And Darcy…Darcy. Darcy would understand it, she thinks, after everything that’s happened. She wouldn’t agree with it, but she’d understand, at least, where it came from. Better than any of the rest of them. She understands the rest of it better than the others.

( _You killed him for us. You killed him to protect us_.)

( _And because I hated him. Because I wanted him dead._ )

She’s run the hypotheticals in her head for days. She tells Frank about Brannigan. Frank breaks out. Brannigan winds up dead. In all likelihood, so does Frank Castle. Reyes will stick another shoot to kill order on him, and with his knee the way it is, he won’t be able to get away in time. The only reason he was brought in alive in the first place was because of Matt and Darcy, Darcy and Matt, dragging him in through the grass of a graveyard. If he goes out again, if he goes after Brannigan again, even with both of them injured—especially with both of them injured—he’s going to wind up dead, and that’s—she doesn’t want that. Something in her throat twists into a tangle at the thought of that. Her palms get sticky and cold. No matter what, she doesn’t want Frank Castle dead.

_But I can’t lie to him, either. We’ve both had enough of people lying to us._

(— _again, and again, and again, and the blood bursts from his chest, Wesley jerks and his glasses slip down his nose and he goes still but she can’t stop firing, she won’t, because_ you won’t touch me again, you won’t touch them, not any of them, not ever again, _and if Wesley had succeeded, if any of them had died, can she really, really say for sure that she wouldn’t have—_ )

“Hey,” says a voice, and Karen has her gun out of her pocket and her back to the fence before she breathes. It’s Santino. Santino and Malcolm Ducasse, and Santino’s eyes pop at the sight of the gun, but Malcom just has his hands up. She supposes after drugs and mind control and Kilgrave, Karen Page with a pistol isn’t very frightening. “Hey, Karen. We’re cool, yeah?”

Karen refolds her fingers on the butt of the gun. She has to unclench her muscles one by one before she can finally lower it, before she can breathe. “Yeah.” She shuts her eyes. “Jesus Christ. Please don’t sneak up on me.”

“Didn’t mean to scare you.” Malcolm’s going to be good, she thinks, as a social worker. He has the voice for it. A social worker or a psychiatrist or whatever it is he chooses to do, once schools take him on. She’ll write his damn recommendation letters herself, if it comes down to it. _Please disregard his criminal record. He was not in his right mind. Actually, someone else had control of his mind. It’s all very complicated. Please let him into your social work program. Signed, a murderess._ “Are you okay?”

“I’m okay.” It’s a lie, a shit, shit lie, and Santino can see it, too. Neither of them say a word. “I—I come out here. With Rey. Sometimes.”

“Figured,” says Malcolm, not looking at the dog. “You wanna put the gun away?”

“Sorry.” She wets her lips. Her thumb is shaking when she puts the safety back on— _when did I take it off safety, when—_ and her hands are shaking when she puts the gun in her purse. Karen rests her weight to the chain link, shuts her eyes. “Oh my god.”

“Hey.” They’re closer, now, both of them. “You’re good. Not the first time someone’s pointed a gun at me. You’re a lot less intimidating than the NYPD.”

“That doesn’t help, Malcolm,” she says, in a wet voice. “It really doesn’t.”

“Don’t worry about it. You’re not nearly so bad as Jess.”

“There aren’t many people who are as bad as Jess.” She swallows. “And Jess hates guns.”

“Yeah, but Jess can also tear your arms off with minimal effort, it’s about as terrifying.” Malcolm reaches out, pats her back. Karen heaves a breath, and wipes her face. “Hey, you’re cool.”

“I’m not having a panic attack, Malcolm.”

“I might be,” says Santino in a thin voice. “Jesus Christ.”

“I’m so, so sorry, Santino, I didn’t—”

“It’s cool, it’s cool, just—we’ll try not to scare you again, hey?”

Karen shakes her head, and yanks Santino into a hug. She doesn’t hug people very often, not outside of the firm, but Santino’s _Santino_ , and he fists his hands up in the back of her peacoat and murmurs something in Spanish too low for her to make out. _I could have shot you. I almost shot you._ Santino’s—Santino’s not Kate or one of the firm, but he’s _Santino_ , Santino who’d helped her and Marci hack into Leland Owlsley’s accounting programs, Santino who’d called Daredevil and Lilith heroes back when everyone else called them monsters, Santino who’s only eighteen and a half years old and already doing so much more for the world than she ever has. She could have shot _Santino_ , and her fingers are trembling. When she lets go, Rey’s plopped herself down on the ground, and shut her eyes.

“We’re here to talk to some of the kids in the abandoned warehouse,” says Malcolm. “Brought some stuff. I know a few of them from when I was using, they’ll let us in. You want to come?”

“Which warehouse?”

He points at the empty warehouse two buildings down.

( _You won’t be the first to die, Miss Page, no. No, I think—I think Mr. Urich will have that honor_.)

Karen swallows. She shakes her head. “No. I—no.”

“You okay?”

“Fine.” Her nails pinch hard into the skin of her palm. “I’m—gonna go.” 

“Want me to call a cab?”

“Too expensive.” She kisses Malcolm’s cheek. “I’ll walk.”

“Back to Hell’s Kitchen?”

“It’s not that long.” Karen puts her lips to Santino’s cheek, too, draws back. “Be safe. Both of you, please—please be safe. Please.”

“It’s a warehouse,” says Santino, puzzled. “You sure you okay?”

“Fine.” She tugs at the leash. “Call me when you get back, all right?”

“Karen,” Santino says, but Malcolm puts a hand on his arm, whispers something too low for Karen to make out. She’s already turned her collar up against the wind off the water, started walking. Neither of them call her back.

.

.

.

“How is it,” says Darcy, dropping her papers onto the floor and knuckling her eyes, “that with all the goddamn paperwork we have about the Fisk case, and all the things that we wound up hacking with Marci—”

“She still wants compensation for that, by the way,” says Foggy absently.

“Tell her to bite me.”

“She might take you seriously.”

“Whatever.” She scowls. “How is it with all the testimony and all the evidence and all the fucking _receipts_ we have on record for this guy we never actually picked up on the fact that he _stole a child_?”

“Because he’s a hobgoblin and a member of the High Fae. He has special witchy powers for child thievery. And for covering it up.” They’re back to back, her and Foggy, and when she leans, he shifts automatically to prop her up. “You doing okay there, smalls?”

She flips him off over her shoulder, and ignores the snorting. “I’m fucking exhausted and working on pure gumption and pissed-offed-ness. How about you?”

“About the same, though I at least slept.” Foggy bumps her with his elbow. “Don’t put your Fisk shit in my Castle shit.”

“Don’t put your Castle shit in my Fisk shit.”

“I can’t believe we’re still looking at Fisk,” Karen says from her desk chair. Darcy had given up on chairs when she’d nearly fallen asleep in one, and retreated to the floor in the hopes that the hard linoleum would at least snap her conscious enough to keep her from breaking her nose if she literally falls on her face. “We’re not supposed to still be looking at Fisk.”

“ _I’m_ still looking at Fisk,” Darcy says. “Since _I’m_ the one who apparently was hired by his foster daughter. Kidnap victim. Foster kidnap victim. Without noticing. Because I’m a fucking idiot. _You guys_ should be looking at our resident Marine with a happy trigger finger and terrible backstory.”

 “There was no reason for you to think she was a plant,” says Karen. “She came through Angie and Jen, remember, it’s not like she just turned up out of the blue. You had good reason to trust her.”

“Like I had good reason to trust Grotto?”

“Grotto _did_ turn up out of the blue. Covered in blood. In retrospect it was…really obviously sketchy.” Foggy shrugs. “Besides, her case is still legit. All those people at the Manhattan School of Music _are_ being harassed—”

And she knows that, but—shit. “She was so goddamn curious about Fisk, I _knew_ something was off about that, I should have—”

“Lots of people have been curious about Fisk over the past year.”

“Will you just let me be an idiot for _once_ —”

“You can be an idiot,” says Foggy. “Being tricked doesn’t make you stupid.”

“I should have—”

“Jesus, Darcy, will you quit?” Karen says, sour. “You sound like Matt.”

“Hey,” says Matt, not lifting his head.

“Not like it’s not true,” says Foggy.

Something in her is raw and bleeding, and they’re just making it worse with the forgiveness. She fucked up, she _fucked up,_ why won’t they just let her have it? (And at a distance she _knows_ how illogical she’s being, like she’s looking down on her downward spiral and shaking her head and trying to pull herself back, but she can’t stop. She _can’t_.) “I won’t quit being mad just because you tell me to!”

“If Jen isn’t stupid for trusting Reyes,” Matt says, suddenly, “then why are you stupid for trusting Marisol?”

“That’s—” She sputters. “That’s not the same!”

“I don’t really see much of a difference. You had no reason to think she wasn’t just a client. Punishing yourself for this doesn’t help anyone at all.” 

Silence, for a second. Then: “Y’all have fucked up lives,” says Kate on the computer screen, and taps at her keyboard. “Seriously, it’s like we’re in a Russian novel or something. All this _drama_.”

“You shush,” says Darcy. Her voice is wet.   

“For someone who’s presumably working for Fisk she’s kinda nice, though.” Foggy leans away from her for a moment, and shifts through paperwork. “Coming and giving you warnings and shit.”

 _Fisk made a lot of mistakes, but maybe—_ “That could be a trick, too.”

“She wasn’t lying when she spoke to me.” Matt takes his glasses off, rubs at his eyes. “She’s cut ties with Brannigan, and she wanted to warn us.”

“She still ran away when you called her Marisol.”

Matt’s mouth goes tight. “That could have been anything.”

“Fisk might be tricking her into doing something.”

“You think Fisk wants us alive?”

Darcy clicks her tongue against her teeth. “Maybe to watch us go nuts like rats in a trap. Which I’m not too far from, I don’t think.”

Foggy nudges her in the back with the point of his elbow, and leaves it there.

“Fisk is in Riker’s.” Matt goes back to rubbing his eyes. “It’s not impossible that he’s manipulating this from behind the scenes, but if he is I doubt Brannigan knows about it. The man who was murdered was one of Fisk’s men inside the Brannigan’s organization, he died because he was loyal to Fisk, it’s more likely that—”

“Vanessa,” says Karen.

“Dr. Quinzel, what have you done,” says Kate, and Darcy makes a face.

“Harley’s been gaslighted and abused by the Joker for fucking decades. Vanessa’s the daughter of a mobster and a full-fledged criminal in her own right. Not comparable.” She muses. “She’s Sofia Falcone.”

“Wait,” says Foggy. “Hangman?”

“Mm.”

“You guys need to stop outnerding me,” says Kate. “I don’t appreciate it.”

“Bite me, Bishop,” says Foggy.

“You keep asking me to and then denying our love, Foggy-Bear.”

Foggy flips Kate off this time, instead.

“I hate to be the one to say this,” Karen says, “but I think it matters less that Fisk managed to hide a kid in plain sight for fifteen years, and more that she seems to be working for the Irish as a bodyguard. She turned up for a reason, whatever it was.”

“She’s not anymore. Brannigan’s not the type to take someone threatening to cut his hand off lightly.”

“That,” says Kate, “was not information presented when you called me to say _help us run through angles, my liege._ ”

“Since when are _you_ my liege?”

“Seriously, guys.” She makes grabby hand motions at the camera. “Deets are necessary. Did Brannigan actually lose his hand, or—”

“And we’re stopping there.” Foggy puts his file back on the floor. “Look, are you guys any closer to finding Brannigan than you were before? Because if you aren’t then we’re kind of screwed.”

Karen makes a little noise in the back of her throat that might be approving, might be frustrated, and pulls her legs up into her spinny chair. On the floor, Rey heaves a sigh, and her paws start to twitch.

“Marisol’s phone is off.” Darcy leans forward, drags another few files into her lap. “And I tried the Orchestra, she hasn’t come in to practice today. _And_ I left a message with her friend Kalia—”

“Friend or ally?”

“I’m thinking friend, just from background, but I also didn’t manage to get in touch with her, so who knows.” Marisol as Fisk’s daughter. Marisol in her _office_. Marisol prying, poking into old case files, wanting to talk to Daredevil and Lilith— _come on, Darcy, you already said you’re going to stop judging people’s actions, you’re better than this,_ but she can’t stop cycling back to that, how it stings and rubs her raw _—_ “This makes no _sense_ , if she’s Fisk’s daughter why would she continue with the suit, why would she keep coming _back_ —”

“I don’t know that that’s relevant, at the moment.”

“How is that not relevant?” Darcy pushes her glasses hard into the bridge of her nose. “If Marisol’s working for Brannigan on behalf of Vanessa, then why would she break off just because the firm’s in danger? She knows the part we played in Fisk getting put away, she _knows_ —”

“Maybe something changed her mind,” Matt says absently, and for some reason, Kate, Karen, and Foggy all turn to look right at Darcy.

“…why are people staring at me?”

“You’re the only one of us who’s had any contact with her. If there’s any witchcraft going on here, it’s coming from you.”

Shit. “All I did was help her with the suit!”

“And figure out who killed her father,” says Foggy. “That’s kind of big.”

“She doesn’t _know_ that I did that yet, that has nothing to do with this, and Elektra did that part—”

“You still volunteered to look,” says Karen. “Didn’t you say no one else offered to help her?”

“Well, I mean, not that I _know_ of—”  

“If Fisk killed her dad,” says Kate, and unwraps a lollipop, “then it stands to reason that he’s been gaslighting the fuck out of her for years and years. She probably has no idea he’s the guy who had her biological father murdered. If Fisk is anything like _my_ dad—”

“That’s a horrible thought.”

“Hey, douchebag dads seem to run wild in rich people circles.” She wedges the Tootsie Pop into her cheek. “Anyway, if he’s anything like my dad, and if he’s as smart as I remember him being, then he’d have shut down every avenue of investigation she could have taken. Never answered her questions, given her bullshit leads. Isolated her and her questions. She wanted to ask Daredevil and Lilith about it, remember?”

“Yeah, as a ruse, probably.”

“Or a genuine thing.” Kate waves her Tootsie Pop at the screen. It’s left purple smears on her mouth. “She might have genuinely had no one else to turn to.”

“You really think she was that desperate?”

“I mean, there’s no way to know other than ask her, but the fact is she could have turned y’all over to Brannigan as soon as he said he wanted to grab you, and she came to warn Daredevil instead.” Foggy shrugs. “Who knows what she wants.”

“Babe, if you’re using _y’all_ , you’ve spent way too much time with me.” Darcy knocks her head to his shoulder and leaves it there. “Just saying.”

“Whatever,” says Foggy, but he shifts around so he can put an arm around her. Darcy sinks into it, shuts her eyes. His collar smells like sour coffee. “You really might be the only person who ever actually _helped_ her, shortstop.”

“Yeah,” Darcy says, “because I’m a gullible idiot.”

“It’s your superpower,” says Kate, and Darcy turns red. Nobody else comments, thankfully, but just— _ow, my heart._ Kate hasn’t mentioned that conversation in months, because since when does Kate mention emotional things, but holy shit. _You treat us like we’re worth something_ is…still kind of way too big for her to grasp, actually. Especially when she’s loopy from no sleep. It’s a Thing. A Thingy Thing that might not necessarily apply to Marisol anyway because she could have been lying about the whole thing, _she lied to me, I trusted her and tried to help and it was Grotto all over again, I can’t—stop, Darcy_. “Besides, you’re good at tricking people into thinking you’re this precious red panda that needs to be protected, it might work on her.”

“No, that’s Foggy. Don’t pinch, bro.”

“Don’t be rude.” Foggy tips and rests his jaw to her hair, though, which kind of negates the tone. “You okay?”

She leans, just for a second more, and then sits up again. “I’ll be better once we catch Brannigan so Frank doesn’t go apeshit rogue.”

“Bats is quiet,” says Kate, tinny through the speakers. “Did he do that thing where he fell asleep?”

“No,” says Matt, and settles a fist against his lips. “Thinking.”

“About superpowers or about apeshit?”

“Fisk,” he says. “And Vanessa. I don’t like that they’ve reached out to the Irish. Even if Vanessa’s doing it independently, it’s—”

“Batshit scary?” says Kate.

“If Vanessa’s reaching out presumably it’s not as Vanessa Marianna,” says Karen. “Jim O’Reardon had his throat slit for being one of Fisk’s men, it’s more likely she’s acting as a Manfredi.”

“Whee, crime families,” says Darcy. “I thought the Manfredis fell apart after Silvio—”

“—was eaten?”

“—vanished,” says Darcy very firmly. “He _vanished_ , Kate.”

“Yeah.” Kate rolls her eyes. “Sure.”

“Fisk is still working behind bars. I don’t like what that could mean.” Matt rubs his hands over his face again. He hasn’t shaved since they started looking for Brannigan, Darcy thinks. He’s hit maximum scruff levels, and she can’t work out if it’s hot or heartbreaking. “If he’s trying to get the Irish into place for something, then—”

“—then getting Brannigan into custody could have unexpected consequences,” says Kate. “I.E., giving Vanessa men she didn’t have before.”

Her stomach knots up.

“ _If_ that’s what she wants,” says Foggy. “If she’s not going full Joker here and just being unhelpful for the fun of it.”

“So you’re saying what, leave Brannigan alone?” says Karen, in an odd voice. “Please tell me that’s not what you’re saying.”

“Of course not, just—” Matt leans back in his chair. “Just that we need to cut both heads off the snake.”

“Again,” says Darcy. “Cut both heads off the snake _again_. Why can’t Fisk and Vanessa just—stay the fuck down and out of the city and _stop_?”

“Whoa,” says Foggy, but she pulls away from the hug, stands up. When she puts the computer on Karen’s desk, Kate’s stopped halfway to putting the lollipop back into her mouth. “Darcy, hey—”

“If I’d caught Vanessa,” she says, “months ago, this wouldn’t be happening.”

“If _we’d_ caught Vanessa.” Kate scowls. “You’re not the only one who didn’t manage it.”

“Still—”

“Seriously, Darcy. Matt caught Fisk—we all caught Fisk, and he’s still apparently raising some royal hell. If it weren’t through Vanessa it’d probably be someone else.”

“I know, but—”

“Stop kicking yourself for things that can’t be fixed,” says Kate. “Vanessa, Marisol, whatever. Just fucking get it done so we can deal with the yakuza and I can stop living in Clint’s apartment. He’ll be back from the compound soon and I kind of drank all his coffee.”

“Katie—”   

“I have to go,” Kate says, and waggles her fingers. “Don’t get too concussed without me.”

“Kate, seriously—”

She’s already ended the call. Darcy shuts the computer, and knuckles at her eyes again. _Come on, brain. Think of things._ Vanessa and Fisk are a looming hurricane, but right now the tornado is Brannigan, and there’s a typhoon coming in too with the Japanese, if that metaphor isn’t too problematic, and she still can kind of taste the tequila from the Pearl and she wants to punch a wall, even though there are still pinkish marks around her knuckles from all the shit she pulled in Metro-General, and she’s going to _scream_ if this keeps happening—

“You’re not going to roll a strike every time, Darcy,” says Foggy, and heaves himself up off the floor. “There are other fires that need to be put out right now. We can—we can deal with Fisk and Vanessa some other way. Find Brannigan first.”

 _It’s Fisk._ She wants to scream. _Fisk nearly destroyed us last time. It’s Fisk and Vanessa, and the yakuza are back too, and Brannigan came back after fifteen years, this was supposed to end, this was supposed to stop, why hasn’t it stopped—_

“Foggy’s right,” says Karen, and Darcy snaps out of it. _Stop. Stop it. Breathe._ “The longer Fisk and Vanessa don’t know we know they’re working again, the more we can get an edge over them. We beat them once, we can do it again. And Brannigan—who knows. Brannigan might know something about where Vanessa is, what she wants. If you find Brannigan, more ammunition against Vanessa.”

 _And we keep Castle in one place,_ Darcy thinks, but she doesn’t say that. It’s already hanging heavy around Karen’s mouth.

“Marisol’s the key,” Matt says. “We find Marisol, we can find Brannigan. Even if he’s moved, she’ll have a better idea of how to find him than anyone else in the city. Find Brannigan, we can get in Vanessa’s way, and crush the Irish all over again. Gives us time to recalibrate and find out a way to stop them.”

“And also get back to, you know, your _jobs_ ,” says Foggy, pointedly. “Just saying.”

“Brannigan might have information about why they were all in the park that day,” Karen says. “He might—he might tell you something about that, too.”

“He didn’t tell Castle when Castle had a shotgun to his face, what makes you think he’ll say anything to Itchy and Scratchy?”

“Am I Itchy or Scratchy?” Darcy says, and Matt leaves his chair, puts his hand to her waist and tugs just a little so her shoulder knocks into his. She’s probably Scratchy, she thinks, considering how her skin is bristling at the moment, but she leans into it anyway, and shuts her eyes. “Inquiring minds must know.”

“If I answer that you’ll just make a sex joke,” says Foggy. “You’re loopy enough.”

“See, I hadn’t thought about that until you said it, Foggy-Bear.”

“Ugh.” He rolls his eyes. “Maybe keep her from keeling over off a rooftop, Matt, I’m kind of concerned her knees are going to give out.”

“That,” says Matt, “was the plan.”

“I’m right here,” Darcy says under her breath.

“Really? Hadn’t noticed.” Foggy dodges her incoming fist, and starts collecting his papers up again. “I need to start working on expert witnesses. Any suggestions?”

“Put Daredevil on the stand,” says Darcy. “Expert witness. Also, it’d piss off Reyes like wow.”

“No,” says Matt.

“But—”

“ _No_.”

“Spoilsport,” she says, and hooks her finger into his jacket pocket. “Think of her face.”

“Think of the jail cell.”

“Think of the finding,” Foggy says, “and get to it instead of flirting like nerds.”

“If anything happens, call Jess,” Matt says.

“I thought Darcy was supposed to be the mom, here.”

Darcy flips Foggy off, and goes to collect her purse.

The address Marisol had put down on her paperwork is, to Darcy’s very great shock, not a dead end. It’s way out in Queens, a two-room apartment with a full mailbox (she peeks through the slits) and a door that neither of them are tempted to break. “She hasn’t been here in two days,” Matt says, and takes her arm again. “Probably not since O’Reardon’s body dropped. Still no answer?”

“No.” She types out another text. _I need to talk to you, Marisol, please respond._ She’s getting terrible flashbacks of Kate going after the yakuza, and she really doesn’t like it. “Well, that was a waste of a train ride. I’m crying inside.”

“Did you actually expect her to be here?”

“No, but it would have been nice and neat if she was.” She’s on her fourth coffee in an hour and her brain isn’t even budging. She’s crossed past exhausted into something much, much more dangerous. If she lies down, she’s not going to get up for two days.

Marked as read. No response.

“ _Damn_ it.”

“What?” Matt curls his fingers into her elbow. “Okay?”

“I’m fine, just—her phone is on but she’s ignoring me.”

He hums, and shifts towards the elevator. Darcy follows without looking up from the screen of her phone. “You sure she’s the one on the other end of that number?”

“Pretty sure.” Though that’s an ominous thought. “What did you get from her, last night?”

“Other than I’m pretty sure Brannigan’s holed up in a crackhouse somewhere, not much.” He shrugs. “Blood. And coffee.”

She muses. “I doubt she’d be hanging out in Mug Shots.”

“You know anywhere else she could be?”

“If she’s ignoring me then I don’t think she’d go anywhere _I_ know. She’s not at work, she wouldn’t go to MSM, and outside of that I don’t— _fuck_.” She kicks the wall. “I have no idea where she’d go. She was a _client_ , I didn’t ask her—shit.”

Matt pushes the down button for the elevator. “We could always give her what she wants.”

“And what’s that?” She swipes through her phone. “Fisk’s head on a platter? Because that’s what _I_ want, I don’t know if that’d go over too well with his daughter.” Jesus, his _daughter._ His victim, his daughter, his weapon. _I’m going to be sick._

“Not exactly.” He waits until the elevator doors have slid shut, and then says, “We could give her the meeting she’s been asking for.”

Darcy jerks her head up, and stares at him. “…you’re joking.”

“She already knows I know her name,” he says. “Or that the Devil does. She’s reached out to you on Twitter, she’s contacted Ben. She’s searching for an answer. She might not actually want to hear it from us, but she’s given us a method of contact. That’s our way in.”

“Still—”

“We’re kind of on a time crunch. I can’t think of anything else. Can you?”

Darcy shakes her head. “Send her a message through Twitter,” she says, slowly, “give her a location and a time—if she comes—”

“She’ll come,” Matt says. “Probably.”

“Probably?”

“Tell her you found out who killed her father,” he says. “She’d come for that.”

There are slivers of nighttime in his jaw. Darcy offers her hand, waits, and Matt takes it. He doesn’t squeeze, his fingers aren’t shaking, but he does hold on, and when he finds a scab on her knuckle with his thumb some of the brittle grief fades from his face.

 _Roscoe Sweeney,_ she thinks.

“If I tweet her,” Darcy says, “everyone will see. That’s not exactly subtle.”

“The other option at this point is involving Ben. Wasn’t sure you wanted to take that risk.”

 _Let us help,_ Karen says, in the back of her head. _We love you, we want to help you. Let us help._  

“I’ll reach out and see if I can get him to send the email without asking too many questions,” Darcy says, finally. “He’ll probably agree. He knows how dangerous Brannigan would be left out in the cold, and he knows what it could do to the Castle case, and he’s already panicked enough about that.”

“Is panicked the right word?”

“He’s worried about Karen. If it’s not panicked it’s close.” Her jaw cracks on a yawn. “She would definitely come, if it came from Lilith, but I don’t—Matt, I really don’t think she’d listen to us. If we were—y’know. I don’t think she’d listen. We’re the people who stuck her foster father in jail, it’s—she’d probably attack us.”

Matt cups the back of her neck, drags his thumb along a stiff muscle, and she leans into his hand with a little purring sound, lets her eyes fall closed. Stars are bursting in her head, and not the good sex kind, either. The implosion and inversion to black holes kind. “You think she’d take it any better from the firm?”

Ah, shit. _Don’t get the pissy lawyer voice, Matt. I’m too tired for this._ “I don’t know what I’m thinking, I just—don’t think she’ll listen if she hears it from Lilith or Daredevil. She might if it comes from me.”

 _Ding_ goes the elevator, and the doors slide open to let the city in. As soon as they step into the lobby, Matt turns his head. She’s not sure if he’s turning away from her, or turning towards a siren, but either way it means she gets an eyeful of the bruise behind his ear from something or other, deep plum. Darcy lifts her hand, rests the very tips of her fingers to it, and Matt turns back to her. He doesn’t pull away.

“Are we being too reckless?”

His jaw goes tight, his eyebrows snap together. “Is that an actual question or a rhetorical one?”

“I know it’s dangerous, just—” A woman passes them in the lobby, all cornrows and nose rings. She’s humming something that sounds like M.I.A. under her breath. Darcy tugs him out of the middle of the room, towards the doors. “She’s not going to figure out who I am if I don’t bring my taser. And if she comes at me, I can stop her. I’ll even bring Frank’s knife, if that’s—”

“Doesn’t help,” Matt says.

“Well, I’d feel better having a weapon.”

“You don’t trust her not to attack you?”

“I’m the lawyer who accused her foster father of attempted murder and I’m now dropping the bomb that her foster father is actually her kidnapper, and that he had her biological father assassinated while she was still in the house. You think she’s _not_ going to attack me when I say that?”

He bobs his head back and forth, as if to say, _Valid_.

“I’m kind of hoping she will to be honest.” _I want to smack the shit out of her._ “Anyway. There’s just a slightly better chance that she’ll listen to Darcy Lewis than she would to—to someone else. She’s…debated, with me, not argued. She’s asked questions that make it seem like—” _Like what, Darcy?_ She’s not sure. Darcy swallows. “Like—kind of like with Karen, I think.”

“You’re putting her on level with Karen?”

“I’m saying she has a right to hear the truth from a face she recognizes the same as the rest of us, and not from someone wearing a mask.”

Matt heaves a breath, and tucks his chin. “If she’s in contact with Vanessa—”

“I know.”

He finds her hand, shifts it away from his jaw so he can slide his fingers between hers. “You’re asleep on your feet.”

“I’m okay.”

“Darcy.”

“Don’t _Darcy_ me.”

“You can barely stand up straight,” says Matt. “I slept, you didn’t. You collapsing on the street isn’t going to help anything.”

“I’ll sleep on the train back into the city. And when we get this meeting over with, I’ll—I’ll go home and sleep for a few hours, okay? Before we get Brannigan. That’s a compromise I’m willing to come to.”

“I can go with Kate to get Brannigan,” he says. “That’s not a problem. She could probably use a few hours out of the apartment.”

“You said that if we do this together we can finish it.” Her jaw hurts. “We’re doing this together, Matt. We finish the Irish, and then—and then we figure out Fisk. And Frank.”

He’s making the _I really can’t argue with that but I want to_ face, she can tell without even turning around. “If—”

“If I don’t think I’m up to it after I sleep, I won’t, but I don’t—” _like splitting up._ She bites her tongue. “I won’t faint. It’s not hot enough for me to faint. Besides, if I’m the one going to meet her, then—”

She stops. There’s an old man getting out of a taxi a few feet away, and he blinks at them slowly, his eyes huge behind his oversized glasses. He looks kind of like a praying mantis. The guy duckfoots away, sorting through papers, and Darcy pulls Matt down the road. “I won’t be wearing, y’know. What I wear.”

Matt nods.

“Foggy will hate this idea,” Darcy says. “I already know Foggy will hate this idea. Foggy will _loathe_ this idea, a lot.”

“Well.” Matt knocks his shoulder into hers. “Karen should be fine with it.”

“Karen and Foggy are in the midst of a cold war. She’d probably be down with it just to piss him off, and then eat all his cornflakes to add insult to injury.” Darcy sighs through her teeth. “I have a bone to pick with Angie, damn it.”

Matt lifts one eyebrow, and then the other. “Really? With Angie?”

“She’s the one who told us about Marisol and her discrimination suit. Marisol probably would have shown up anyway, but Angie pulled us into this mess faster than entirely necessary.”

“I know, but—fighting _Angie_?”

She makes a face. “You don’t think I could beat her?”

“ _I_ don’t want to pick a fight with Angie. Angie scares me. Angie should scare anyone.”

She shoves him hard in the ribs, and tolerates it when he snakes an arm around her shoulders to tug her into him again. It has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that he’s laughing.

She’s never really been able to sleep on trains, but she can, at least, doze on subways. She fiddles with her phone for a good ten minutes before she’s satisfied with the text she sends Ben ( _need your help with something, please meet us at the firm in an hour_ ) and then she puts her head on Matt’s shoulder, drags her bag up onto her lap, and shuts her eyes. Two kids with a skateboard had been nice enough to get up and offer Matt their seat, so she actually _can_ sit down, as opposed to doze standing up with her forehead resting on his chest, which is what she’d been planning. Someone’s listening to opera on her opposite side, and Pavarotti is trilling through their headphones into the back of her brain. She drifts, in and out of the world, matched in rhythm with the constant open-and close of the subway doors.

She should have expected that Ben wouldn’t have the patience to wait at the firm like, say, Kate would have. As soon as they clamber out of the subway station and start the slog back to the office (it’s not actually that far, just a pain in the ass) Ben pounces from behind the nearest lamppost. _Which, creepy, Urich. Like Heathcliff level creepy there._

“What’s the favor?” he says without preamble, and falls into step on Darcy’s other side. “Murdock.”

“Urich,” says Matt. “You maybe want to lower your voice?”

“Please. I’m not yelling. You’ve heard me yell. This is not yelling.” Ben rubs at the back of his neck. “What’s the favor?”

“I’d rather not talk about it on the street.” Darcy checks her phone again—still no response—and says, “How deep are you down the Punisher rabbithole?”

“What the hell is a Punisher rabbithole?”

“Exactly what it sounds like,” Darcy says. “A hole from which the Punisher emerges like so many rabid rabbits. I swear to God you crop up like a dandelion out of a sidewalk.”

“That’s the nicest metaphor anyone’s used.” Ben cuts his eyes to Matt for a moment, and then actually looks at Darcy’s face. “You look like hell again.”

“I don’t need _everyone_ mothering me, thank you, gentlemen.” She leans just a bit into Matt’s shoulder to take the sting away. “You’re like twenty minutes early, were you lurking around here?”

“It’s called being punctual.” He doesn’t hug her, but he does the Ben Urich equivalent, which is reaching out and squeezing your shoulder hard enough to possibly leave bruises behind. “This have anything to do with Castle?”

“Only tangentially, so far as I know.” Though it’d be just their luck that all of it was interconnected like wow. “You’re still early.”

“It’s a virtue.”

“Only in certain circumstances.”

“Hah.” Ben gives Matt another top-to-toe look. “You look like shit too, did you fall into the third rail?”

“That’s what I’ve always wanted to hear from you, Ben.”

“Quit being cute, it’s not going to make me like you.”

“Can you guys not flirt today, please?” The space behind her eyes aches. “I just need you to send an email, Ben, that’s all.”

“An email to who?”

So much for waiting until the office. She looks one way, and then the other, and then tells him, in a low voice to keep anyone passing from overhearing, going over it as quickly as she can. Ben’s eyebrows are creeping into one, monstrous union when she finishes.

“Christ,” he says.

“Yeah, that’s about it.”

“ _Christ,_ ” Ben says again. “Devil know you’re doing this?”

Matt presses his fingers so hard into Darcy’s elbow that he’s probably leaving marks behind. She keeps her face straight.

“He’s fairly aware of it, yeah.”

“Ah, shit.” Ben rubs at his face. “I can email her, sure. And give you a place to meet that won’t be on Fisk’s radar.”

“Ben, I just need you to send her an email, seriously—”

“You know how you’re going to explain how you know all of that without dragging your costume into the whole thing?” Ben shakes his head. “She’s already contacted me once. I can take the fall.”

“Ben—”

“Don’t argue with me, Lewis. Or you,” he adds, when Matt opens his mouth. “Christ, all of you. If you’re planning on meeting a potential source, you don’t just plunge in with both feet and hope for the best. You need at least some semblance of legitimacy. You want her to believe this story, then you don’t just give her answers like _I don’t know_ or _I can’t tell you_ , she won’t believe a word you say.”

“Ben, seriously—”

“If you’re worried,” Ben says, “don’t be. Hearing Vanessa and Fisk are still in play isn’t the most settling of news, but it makes more sense than it doesn’t. It’s not as though the bad guys ever stay down for too long. If they did, I’d probably be out of a job.” He side-eyes Darcy. “And so would you, y’know.”

“No, I know that, just—” She rubs at her eyes. “I don’t know.”

Ben has that sharp look on his face, the one that Karen gets sometimes, the _I know exactly what you’re saying and why you’re saying it and I’m biting my tongue hard enough to bleed so I don’t ask for a quote about it._ “Well, it explains why the Manfredis are creeping out of the woodwork again, at least. I’d been wondering.” He flares his car keys at them. “Come with me.”

“Where are we even going?”

“Place I know.” He tips his head. “Murdock, I can drop you at the office.”

“I’m coming,” says Matt, before she can say anything. “Don’t argue, Ben.”

Ben, of course, ignores this. “Lewis?”

Darcy hesitates. “Ben, can you give us a second?”

Ben looks at Matt, and then at Darcy, and then shrugs. “Your funeral. Which, coincidentally, will be shortly, if you keep living this way.”

“Thanks,” says Darcy sourly. “Shoo.”

Ben shoos.

“You should stay,” she says. “Here, at the firm.”

“Darcy—”

“Matt, if Brannigan’s after all of us, Foggy and Karen—Kate’s under wraps at the moment, she can’t help keep an eye on them. And if it were any other situation, I’d—they’d be okay alone, but if someone’s actively targeting the firm, then even with training there could be trouble.” She wets her lips. “We can’t both go after Marisol if Brannigan’s looking for an opening. You know that as well as I do.”

Matt has the strangest face, like he’s just been smacked with a shovel. “I don’t—”

“I’ll be fine.” She braces her hands to his chest. “Seriously. Marisol won’t hurt me. But if Brannigan shows up, then—”

“And if it turns out that this is a trap and she’s still working for Brannigan and she brings a whole passel of Irish along with her, what will you do alone?”

Darcy opens her mouth, and shuts it again.

“After the Yakatomi Building you said that you don’t—” He lifts his face to the sky, swallows. “You can’t lose me, I can’t lose you. We go from there. And you keep telling me not to do things alone, to ask for help, or—or accept it, when I need it, not cut other people out—”

“Matt—”

“And then lately it’s like you’re—” He cuts off. “You’re getting real damn close to doing the same thing you keep telling _me_ not to do. Like with Elektra, last night.” 

“Matt—” Her voice cracks. “Seriously—”

“We can’t always have each other’s backs,” he says. “That’s not how the world works, we both know that. With some things we’re going to have to work separately. But before, it wasn’t—it wasn’t a _question._ That we would if we could. Don’t keep asking me to watch you walk away into something that might kill you, Darcy. Not after everything.”

 _Ouch._ She can’t speak for a moment, that hurts so badly. It sweeps over her like the crest of a wave, pain and anger and frustration and confusion and _why_ , just the feeling of _why_ , _why_ did this have to happen when things were finally starting to get better, _why,_ and she’s drowning in all of it. Darcy drops her hands to her sides, and lets her hair fall in front of her eyes.

“I’ll call Jess,” he says, after a moment, and turns away from her. Her vision blurs out. Darcy shoves her hands into the pockets of her coat, and stares hard at the asphalt. _That’s not what I’m doing_ , she wants to say, _that’s not what I’m doing, I’m just trying to fix it,_ but he’s already on the phone with Jess, and— _shit. Is that what I’m doing?_

She keeps her eyes on the ground.

It’s only once Matt’s finished his low argument with Jess (“Don’t make me say please when we both know you’ll do it, Jessica.” Silence. “Yes, we’ll tell you later.”) and let Foggy and Karen know about the incoming nuclear missile (christened _J Jones_ ) that Ben finally creeps forward again, eyebrows lifting. “Well?”

“Matt’s coming,” says Darcy, hoarse. “Marisol won’t attack Matt, and he’s safer with me. Besides, he makes us less suspicious-looking. Matt has an aura of respectability.”

Matt rolls his eyes behind his glasses.

“Fine.” Ben jerks his head. “C’mon. You need to stop for anything?”

“The apartment,” Darcy says. “It’ll take five minutes. I need to get my gun.”

“Maybe don’t say _that_ in the middle of a crowded street,” says Ben, but he gestures them towards the car anyway. There’s new glass in the back window, finally. “You break this car again, you’re the one paying for it.”

“I wasn’t the one who took a potshot at it,” Darcy says, and herds Matt into the backseat.

The apartment feels cold, when she lets herself in. Darcy switches out her bag, and stows Matt’s sticks at the bottom of it. She’s really, really not inclined to pack the whole costume into a car with _Ben Urich_ , of all people, considering the circumstances, but neither of them should be there unarmed, even if Ben is tagging along. Which oddly fits, she thinks, as she changes into jeans and wedges the gun she stole from Turk Barrett into her waistband, safety on. Mad-Eye Moody is whispering _Better wizards than you have lost buttocks that way_ in her head. _Yes, thank you, Professor, I appreciate knowing that. I will imagine that until the gun is back out of my pants._ She sweeps the apartment one last time, and then on second thought changes her shoes to the combat boots she hasn’t worn since law school, and stops to look at herself in the mirror.

“Hypocrite,” she says to her reflection. “Filthy goddamn hypocrite.”

Her reflection mouths it back at her, mocking. Darcy slams out of the apartment, and locks the door behind her.

“She already responded,” is the first thing Ben says when she gets back into the car. “We’re on for noon. And if you needed information about Rigoletto’s Maggia, I could have helped.”

“Nope. You were helping Karen with Frank, I didn’t want to distract you. Or let on that you’re connected to us. You know better than that.”

The look on Ben’s face at that is something she’s only ever seen directed at Kate. He sighs. “Whatever.  To be fair, dunno that I’d have found out what you did. I always figured that someone from the Manfredis took out Lincoln and the other favorites just took advantage. Silke’s whereabouts have been a secret for years. I’d kill to know your friend’s source.”

Darcy glances at the rear view mirror. Matt’s turned his face to the window, propped his chin in one hand. He stays quiet.

“Yeah,” she says, finally. “I would too.”

Ben drives them in circles for at least an hour (to throw off a tail, or because he can’t remember where this place is, six of one, half dozen of the other) before he finally pulls out of the city and onto the turnpike out to Jersey. They’re crossing the water when it hits her, a tomato to the face, a bullet to the heart. Darcy stares out the window at the bridge railing, and her heart’s a mess, a mix of pain and joy, because _Matt—_

_With some things we’re going to have to work separately. But before, it wasn’t—it wasn’t a question. That we would if we could._

_Oh,_ she thinks, and finds him in the mirror. Something blooms in her chest like sunlight. _There you are._ Not the Matt that had gone rushing in against Frank Castle but the Matt who’d run alongside her against Fisk, the Matt who’d settled on her fire escape and helped her go after the Goodmans, the Matt who had told Karen the truth in the face of all the lies, the Matt who’s her partner, the Matt who keeps her from going off the rails with a hand on her shoulder, not darting out of her reach, the Matt she loves more than anything. _That_ Matt is back, not just in pieces but in the whole. She’s not sure why this, out of everything, is smacking her in the face, but it is. The safety net is gone, the freefall is over, and he’s caught her. There’s no shattering on the pavement. _There you are. This is who you are._ _I missed you so much._ It’s like something in the world’s steadied out again, some piece has slotted back into place, and the last of it fades, the uneasiness, the rage. It scorches off in the sunlight on the water, even as she’s begging for air. When Matt turns his face to her in the mirror, she just looks at him. She can’t look away.

“What’s that look for?” Ben says, and she wipes it off her face.

“Just thinking.”  

It’s another twenty minutes before they finally roll to a stop, in the lot of an old empty warehouse. Ben turns off the car. They’re far out of the city, looking at the island of Manhattan from the Jersey side, and Darcy, for all her immigrant status in the Great Island of Manhattan, feels slightly skeeved out to be, y’know. In Jersey.

“I met with my Rigoletto source here,” Ben says. “Before he moved to Florida. Was always safer to meet in another state just in case the cops caught us.”

“That’s totally reassuring.”

“Hey, he sent me gift baskets during Hanukkah for the courtesy. Not bad, for a Maggia lieutenant.” Ben knocks his head to the back of his seat, shuts his eyes behind his glasses. “Nobody ever comes out this way. People who owned that warehouse went down with the Incident. Bankrupted, never recovered. It’s going to be torn down, I think, eventually, but not yet.”

“And when it is we can have a funeral for it.” Darcy shuts her eyes. “Put up a monument. _Here Ben Urich met with sketchy criminals to write hard-hitting news. Nineteen-seventy-something to twenty-sixteen_.”

“You think you’re cute.” Ben looks down the waterfront. “I’m gonna walk. You should stay in the car if she shows up early. Don’t want to spook her.”

“You cutting me out entirely, Urich?”

“Just sit in the car and sleep, you look like you need it.”

Ben slams the door behind him, not because he’s pissy, she doesn’t think, but because he slams doors. Darcy shuts her eyes again, and shifts around on her shoulder to look at Matt. _Hi, it’s you,_ and it burns at her tongue. She can’t voice it. “You okay?”

“I’m fine.” He looks a little crammed in the back seat, but his face is clear, at least. “Bring a reporter to a secret meet-up.”

“Give a mouse a cookie?” It’s half-hearted, by her standards. Darcy heaves the bag out from between her feet, passes it back to him. “Sticks, just in case.”

“Yeah.” He rests the bag on the seat. “You think she’ll show?”

“I don’t think she’d have emailed back if she didn’t at least plan to try.”

“You know her better than the rest of us,” Matt says. “So.”

“I don’t know if I really knew her at all,” Darcy says, vaguely. She stares at the pine-shaped air freshener hanging from Ben’s rear-view mirror. “To be entirely honest.”

 _Marisol Guerra._ Her name changed, in case someone came looking. _In case someone figured out Fisk took her, maybe._ Her name changed, moved to Arizona. _Where no one would look for her._ Her father murdered. _He told me to run._ God, had Willie Lincoln known Fisk was after his daughter? Larks, Fisk, Vanessa. The Irish. Darcy had thought, back when Marisol had first told her about Willie Lincoln, back when she’d first agreed to look into it, that this is a story that angles too, too close to Matt’s, a father murdered, a sudden, dangerous benefactor. A special gift, she realizes. A gift and a cost. _Marisol Guerra._ What had her name been, anyway, before she’d been stolen by Fisk? Miss Ninja on a rooftop, in a catacomb. _I’m whoever they want me to be._

“Am I stupid for being furious with her?” Darcy says, so quietly that she barely hears it. It’s just her lips moving. Matt shifts, turns his head to face her. “I get it, she—she was trying to infiltrate the firm or learn something or use us or _something_ , but she—I liked her. I thought she was, y’know. A friend, sort of. She was the one normal thing left, and she turned out to be—not. And I’m angry. And hurt. And really skeeved out, holy shit, I’m _so_ skeeved out that Vanessa sent her to do this. But mostly just…it stings.”

“You’re not stupid.”

“You’re biased.”

“Mm.” He reaches out and finds her hand halfway. “Maybe. But you’re not.”

Her throat hurts. “I’m a naïve idiot.”

“You’re not.”

“The third time in a month, Matt.” She resettles her cheek on the rough fabric of the passenger’s seat. “First Grote, and then Frank, and now Marisol, I just keep—I keep expecting people to do one thing or be one thing and it keeps biting me in the ass, and I _know_ better. I know better than to do that.”

“You’re not the only one who made a mistake with Grotto,” Matt says. “Or Frank. You’re not the only person on the planet who’s misjudged someone.”

“But—”

“We’re all tired,” he says. “We’re all exhausted, and people—people lie. And hide. You letting your guard down doesn’t mean you’re an idiot.”

She shuts her eyes. _But I keep fucking up and I don’t know how to stop it._ She keeps looking at herself and her mind and spiraling out of control and not knowing how to pull herself back. “She’s going to hate me for telling her the truth. She probably won’t believe me.”

“That’s not your fault.” There’s a thumb tickling back and forth across her knuckles. “This started fifteen years ago. It’s just—it’s more of Fisk. All of it is more of Fisk.”

Darcy turns. The light reflecting off the water of the Hudson burns at her retinas. “I thought we were done with Fisk. I thought he was finished.”

“I did too,” says Matt. He holds tighter to her hand. “Karen’s right. We’ve already beaten him once, when he was much stronger than this. We can do it again.”

“Vanessa—”

“We’ll deal with it.”

“Optimist,” she says, and he snorts.

“Not generally, no.”

Silence.

“Did you mean it,” Darcy blurts, and Matt blinks. “What you said, earlier, about—about how it wasn’t a question, did you mean that?”

His eyes flare wide open behind his glasses. “Darcy, Jesus Christ, of course that’s not a question, of course I’m going to watch your back, I’m not—”

“No, I know, but—” She can’t words. “But you meant it, and I just—”

“Darcy—”   

“I’m sorry.” It comes out tangled. “I’m—you’re right, I’ve been a hypocrite lately, I’m sorry—”

“Hey.” Matt reaches forward with his free hand, touches her cheek. His fingertips come away wet. “Hey, no. It’s okay. You’re okay.”

“Whale shark,” she says, and Matt doesn’t laugh. He cups her face in both his hands. “Complete—complete and total whale shark bullshit.”

“Jess will keep them safe,” he says, and she hiccups, because that’s _not_ what she’s worried about. She knows Jess will keep them safe. It’s that she’s a hypocrite and she’s terrified and she’s exhausted and she needs to sleep and she can’t keep doing this this way and she’s veering between all right and so, so far from it that she can’t even speak, and Marisol lied to her and she didn’t even notice, she should have _noticed_ , and the yakuza are back and Fisk is back and everyone she thought she’d never have to deal with again is crawling out of the woodwork, and now she can’t even _breathe_ properly, what the fuck—

“I’m so tired _,_ ” she says, and she’s crying when Matt puts his mouth to her hairline. “Matt, I’m so, so tired, I’m tired all the time and stupid things are making me panic and I keep missing the obvious and I don’t know how to stop—” 

“Hey,” Matt says again, and she undoes the seatbelt and clambers into the backseat and hides, presses her face into the crook of his neck and breathes, in and out, trying so damn hard not to cry and not doing so hot at the actual not-doing it. “Darcy, hey—”

“It was getting better,” she says. “It was getting better and then all of this came out and it was getting _better,_ Matt, this was supposed to be over, they weren’t supposed to come back, not—not Fisk or Vanessa or Kim or any of them, they weren’t supposed to be able to come back—”

“I know.”

“—and everyone keeps asking me if I’m okay and I’m not and I don’t know what to do and I don’t know how to fix it and I _can’t_ —”

“Let me help you, sweetheart,” he says, and she cracks. “Please let me help you. I can’t do anything if you don’t tell me what’s wrong.”

She shuts her mouth, and shakes her head.

“I know—” Matt stops, rasping. “I know that—that you’re still not sure if you can trust me, not about—stuff like this, I know it’s difficult, but I don’t—”   

“No,” Darcy says, and he lets out a sharp breath. “It’s—I do. I mean, I do trust you, Matt, it’s—and I’m sorry it took—”

“Don’t apologize.” He rests his cheek to her hair. “You don’t have to apologize. You were right.”

 _Shit._ Her whole chest is unraveling. Her fingers shake. Darcy fists her hand up in the sleeve of her hoodie, and wipes at her face with the cuff.

“This isn’t the time to talk about it,” he says. She hooks her fingers into his shirt. “Or the place. But you—you do know you can tell me. Right? If you’re scared or—or panicked or worried or angry or any of it, you can tell me. I want you to tell me. You’re not going to shatter me if you do. Just—please don’t hide the hard things from me anymore. I can’t—” His voice snaps apart. “Darcy, I can’t keep watching you break.”

Darcy shifts back, and drags her mouth over his cheek, to his ear, winding her arms tight around his neck and holding on. Matt tangles his fingers in her hair, stroking his thumb in a circle at the base of her neck, and finally, finally, _finally_ , they’re even again, _finally_ they’re even again. “There you are,” she says, and smiles even as she starts crying again, petting at his cheeks and jaw and hair. “There you are.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Matt says, sounding puzzled, “I told you that,” and she shakes her head and puts her cheek to his and breathes him, shivering. Her eyes hurt.  

“Matt,” she says. “I’m so _tired._ ”

“I know,” he says. “So am I.”

.

.

.

The phone rings.

“Miss Manfredi.”

“Mr. Brannigan.”

A pause.

“I would like to formally apologize,” Vanessa says, “for the way I behaved in our previous conversation.”

“Really.”

“It was unnecessary.” She draws a great breath in through her nose, and holds it. “I find myself frustrated with other ventures. I hope you will forgive me.”

“Very prim and proper of you,” says Brannigan. “An apology like that. Should be written on heavyweight paper. Signed in calligraphy. Neat and trim and tidy.”

“I went to boarding school.”

“I’m not in the mood for apologies, Silvia,” he says. “Do you know where the hell your girl is right now?”

Vanessa stops with her hand on the knob for the propane stove, phone pressed to her ear. “What do you mean, where is she?”

“She threatened to cut my hand off last night,” says Brannigan, and her heart skips a beat. “Went running off somewhere, and now I get a call from one of my men that she’s on her way out to Jersey to some secret bloody meeting!”

 _Maya, Maya, Maya, what on earth are you doing?_ “She didn’t tell you about it?”

“Girl hasn’t said a bloody word to me since last night. Threw a damn fit about going after the lawyers, I can only assume she’s on her way to warn them or meet with them or start something or other.” Someone shouts something on the other end.There’s a clattering, pills in a bottle. His tranquilizers, or his placebo pills, or whatever the hell they are. When he speaks again, his voice is steadier. “Get your damn mutant in line, Silvia. You want more men for whatever it is you’re planning, that’s my stipulation. Get her in line or have her dealt with, because if she snaps at me again, she’s going to wind up in pieces.”

He hangs up. Vanessa stares at the kettle, at the flickering flame of the burner, and then turns off the stove. She opens Skype on her phone, taps the video call option.

_Would you like to leave a message?_

Vanessa seizes the kettle, and flings it at the wall. It leaves a dent roughly the size and shape of a basketball in the drywall, and water spills everywhere. She’s panting, furious and not the least bit composed, but she’s glad she’s done it anyway. _This damn house and this reckless, stupid girl._ None of them have the time for this. _The Hand of Darkness is coming_ , Iris had said. _They have existed for a thousand years, all over the world, pockets of power and of filth. They have shrouded themselves in darkness and superstition, and they are coming to claim this city as their own. There’ll be a hell of a fight to keep them out of it, if you and Wilson still dream your idealistic dreams._

“Miss Vanessa?” Christian pokes his head in, looks at the kettle, then at her face. “Is everything all right?”

“ _No_ ,” she snaps, and rubs at her forehead. _Don’t scream. Don’t scream. Manage it, Vanessa._ She’s not about to let everything spiral out of control because of those damn lawyers, _again_ , she _will not_ let it happen again, not because of the lawyers and certainly not because of Lilith or Daredevil. _What the hell kind of lure do they have on people, these attorneys?_

 _She reminded me of you,_ Wilson had said. _The Lewis woman. She threw herself in between me and the Devil, and it reminded me very strongly of you._

“Miss Vanessa?”

Abruptly, she thinks: _fuck this._ “Contact Mr. Donovan and let him know that he’ll need to inform Wilson that Maya has gone rogue. Have him call me back as soon as he has Wilson’s response. Wilson knows her much better than me; if anyone will be able to draw her back, it’ll be him.”

Christian takes this with aplomb, and simply whips out his phone. “What about the Guerras?”

Vanessa waves her hand. She doesn’t care about the Guerras, particularly. “Send them back to Arizona. Tell them not to contact her unless otherwise instructed.”

“That may be difficult. They’re very fond of her.”

“Tell them if they try, she dies,” says Vanessa. “And do it in the next twenty minutes. I need to pack a few things. And call Madame Gao. If we can’t use carrots, we have to resort to sticks.”

Christian stops, halfway through dialing a number. “Miss?”

“I’m done waiting,” she says. Done waiting, done wondering, done sitting on the sidelines. Done with watching all her plans go up in smoke because of devils and angels. “We’re going to New York. Today.”

.

.

.

The light’s changed on the water and Ben’s clambered back into the car when Matt shakes her awake. Or fully conscious, anyway. She can kind of hear them talking over her head, voices slurring back and forth like snakes between reeds, even if she’s not really awake enough to make out what they’re saying. There’s a hand on her shoulder, and she doesn’t bat it away, so it must be Matt and not Ben. A thumb pressed to her collarbone. “Darcy.”

She tries to say _what_ , and it comes out as _ngrah._

“Untranslatable, sweetheart,” Matt says. She scowls against his shoulder.

“So’s your mom.”

“You’ll have to track her down and tell her that, I think she’d appreciate it.” He strokes the side of her throat, absently. “Ben says there’s a car coming.”

More like Matt heard it a mile out and had to hold his tongue to keep from twitching. _Showtime, Lewis, come on._ She feels like death. Like…actual death. Swam through the River Styx to get here, mummy bandages in her mouth, embalmed and buried and snapping awake in a coffin level of death. Darcy blinks, slowly, and lifts her head from Matt’s shoulder. She doesn’t even have the energy to be embarrassed that Ben basically caught her in Matt’s lap. “Fuck.”

“You okay?” Ben says.

“You shouldn’t have let me sleep.” She rubs at her eyes, feeling like an elementary schooler. “How long have I been—”

“Almost two hours,” Matt says. “She was late. Didn’t see a reason to wake you.”

“Course you didn’t.” She wipes at her cheek, checks for drool. Nothing, surprisingly. On the driver’s side, Ben keeps his mouth shut. “She say she was gonna be late?”

“She sent an email,” says Ben.

“You think she met with Fisk?”

“I don’t think she could get all the way to Riker’s and back to Jersey in two hours, but that’s me.” Ben sucks his teeth. “You know what we’re doing?”

“Letting you take the blame for all the Lilith things.” She stifles a yawn. “Which I don’t like, Ben.”

“You don’t have a lot of choice, unless you want to have a full-on soldier from the mountains moment and put on a mask to talk to her.”

“Was that a Disney reference?”

“I have nieces and nephews, Lewis, I’m not completely culturally illiterate.” He checks his phone, shoves it into his back pocket. At the far end of the parking lot, a beat-up pick-up truck—a Chevy, not a Ford, but it’s a dull, brickish red that makes her think of John Wayne movies. “That her?”

“I don’t know what her car looks like, but probably.”

He unbuckles his seatbelt. “Stay in the car.”

“Ben, seriously—”

“ _Stay_ ,” he says, and slams out of the vehicle. Darcy shifts off of Matt to settle on the backseat, and looks back just in time to see the trunk come to a shuddery halt. The door opens. And yeah, that’s definitely Marisol, in jeans and a heavy leather bomber jacket, her hair whipping around her face in the wind off the ocean. Both Marisol and Elektra have a bomber jacket thing, apparently. The cut of the collar is different for Marisol’s, the lining a different color. The leather’s not as dark. Darcy curls deeper into her Columbia hoodie (she stole this one from Matt about three weeks after they’d started dating, and she cycles it back to him periodically for purposes of boyfriend smells, but whatever, it’s hers now) and waits, looking at her, watching the battle on her face. It’s obvious even at this distance, all blood and bombs and mustard gas.

Matt tips his head, and listens.

“She’s armed,” he says after a moment. “Knife. Nothing else.”

“She panicked?”

“Not yet. Nervous.” Marisol flashes a look at Ben’s car, snaps back to Ben. “She wants to know what we’re doing here.”

“Yeah, figured that much.” The gun feels like a living thing pressed against the small of her back. “What’s Ben saying?”

“Mostly what he said he would.” Matt’s lips twitch. “That you’re trustworthy.”

“Awww, Ben.” She’s all fuzzy now. “He’s—”

“—waving.” Matt finds the car door handle. “She smells like blood.”

“Old or new?”

“Old, but—a lot. A lot of blood.” She slides out after him, and puts her elbow into his hand. “Careful.”

“Sir, yes, sir,” she says, yawning again, and congratulates herself for the look on his face.

There are clouds in the distance, soft and grey, and the smell off the river is more sunshine than storm. Salt and fish and stone. Marisol’s resting on the grill of her pick-up truck, arms crossed tight over her chest. There are rings under her eyes like she hasn’t slept— _welcome to the club, lady_ —and her fingers trill odd patterns against the sleeve of her bomber jacket as Darcy and Matt come to stand with Ben, Matt letting her arm slip away from him to hold his cane to his chest. In one of her art history classes, Darcy thinks, there had been photographs of the tombs of the Templar Knights at Temple Church in London—that’s what Matt looks like right now. A cane instead of a sword, but still. She rubs at the tundra swan on the inside of her wrist, and lets her hands drop to her sides.

“Ben says you found something,” Marisol says, without preamble. Her earrings are shaped like bird cages. _The cage or the bird,_ Darcy thinks, _Bioshock Infinite_ and Elizabeth Comstock and Anna DeWitt. Elizabeth DeWitt. _The bird or the cage._ “What is it?”

Darcy looks at Ben. “What did you tell her?”

Ben shrugs. “Figured I’d let you start.”

Right. Okay then. She wets her lips. “I’ve been trying to reach you all day.”

Marisol looks out at the water for a moment. “I thought that was about—about something else.”

 _About Daredevil,_ she thinks. She bites her tongue.

“You’re not going to like it,” Darcy says. Marisol doesn’t respond right away. _Deaf,_ Matt had said. She’s deaf, or hard of hearing, and it explains a lot about the phone issues. Darcy waits until she’s turned back around, and then says it again, “You’re really not going to like it,” waits for the shadows to flicker and fade around Marisol’s eyes.

“Pretty sure it can’t be anything worse than I’ve imagined.”

 _You lied to me,_ Darcy thinks, looking at her. “Pretty sure it can.”

Marisol’s mouth narrows even further.

“Tell me,” she says.

It takes longer than five minutes, but Marisol doesn’t seem to be keeping track of it _._ Ben takes notes—she can see Ben taking notes, not from behind Marisol but kind of to the side, dabbing a few things down in pencil and rubbing at the page with his thumb like he wants to wipe away a stain—but Marisol says nothing. She listens, and she bites her lip until it goes sheet white, almost unblinking, listens in silence as Darcy runs out of things to say, as Ben picks up the narrative they’d given him in the car. She doesn’t scream, she doesn’t move, she doesn’t even seem to breathe, and when Ben finally stops, she turns her face west, and stares at the water. Her fists shake where she’s bunched them up in her pockets.

“That can’t be right,” she says, when a minute’s passed. “That—that can’t be it.”

Ben catches Darcy’s eye, and shakes his head before she opens her mouth.

“That can’t be _right_.” Marisol’s voice shakes. “That’s—Larks—”

Darcy stands, and waits there. She folds her hands in and out of knots. Marisol is crying, mascara and eyeshadow streaking down her cheeks, but she’s doing it in total silence. Her breathing rasps in her throat. Marisol turns her face back to Darcy, looks at her.

“You can’t be _right_ ,” she says again. “That’s—you’ve found the wrong thing, that can’t—”

“I haven’t,” Darcy says. “I don’t think, anyway.”

“So you’re asking me to believe you without—without any proof, of any of it?”

“I know it sounds crazy.”

“It’s more than crazy, it’s—” Her hands whisper through the air like birds, like she’s searching for something she can’t reach. “It can’t—Wilson sent me to school, he taught me how to _drive_ , he—”

“Lied,” says Darcy. Marisol flinches again. “He lied.”

“He tried to—” Marisol stops, because the words on the tip of her tongue are already hanging in the air, even unspoken. _Wilson tried to kill you._ “You have every reason to lie to me.”

“Starting with you lying to me,” Darcy says, and her voice pops, all bonfire crackling. “But that’s not the point.”

“That’s _completely_ the point—”

“You lying to me doesn’t mean I’m going to lie to you.”

Marisol scoffs. “I didn’t come here to be _guilted_ into believing—”

“You _owe me_ ,” Darcy snaps. Marisol turns her head, her eyes flicking from Darcy’s glasses to her mouth and back. “You owe me the benefit of the fucking doubt. You owe me that after lying to me for the past month about who you were and what you wanted and why you came to our firm in the first place. You _owe me_.”

“If I hadn’t lied,” Marisol says, “you would never have helped me.”

“You never gave me the opportunity to _choose_.”

Marisol swallows, visibly. 

“Fisk tried to kill me,” she says. “Which you knew. But all of this _fits_. You can’t say it doesn’t fit. Ben verified this, Lilith verified it, I don’t have any reason to make something like this up, Marisol—” 

“ _Don’t_ ,” Marisol says. “Don’t call me—don’t call me Marisol.”

“I don’t know what else to call you.”

Marisol starts pacing, back and forth. “What if that man, what if—what if Silke was lying, what if—”

“He wasn’t.”

“ _You can’t know that._ ”

Darcy opens her mouth, and then shuts it again.

“People don’t lie to Lilith,” Ben says. “As a general rule.” 

Marisol’s eyes drop to Darcy’s hand, and flick back up to her face. “I don’t—I can’t believe any of this. I _won’t_ believe any of this, you have no idea what they’re like—”

“Neither do you,” says Ben.

More pacing. Rhythmic as a grandfather clock, a pendulum swaying back and forth. _The Pit and the Pendulum_ , she thinks, suddenly. A wide sharp blade sweeping down and down and down. Rats gnawing at your feet as it comes.

“I know it doesn’t feel like it right now,” Ben says, quietly, “but the only way you can make a decision is if you have all the facts.”

“I don’t have a decision to _make_ ,” Marisol snaps back. “Both of you— _all_ of you could be lying, Wilson took me in when my father—”

Christ, Darcy wants to _shake_ her. _Wilson Fisk is a monster,_ she can taste it on her tongue, _Wilson Fisk wanted to burn a whole city down because he didn’t get his way, Wilson Fisk tried to kill me, tried to kill Matt, tried to kill Karen, Wilson Fisk is a monster and Vanessa Marianna is no better and this isn’t something to fucking argue about_ , but Marisol’s hyperventilating, her chest rising and falling like a piston, and _God, Marisol, I’m so, so sorry_. She’s furious but how can she not feel pain for this, how is she supposed to be immune to this, when someone’s whole world is coming down into pieces—

“Can you honestly say,” says Ben, “that this isn’t something he would be capable of?”

“ _Yes_ ,” Marisol says, and then stammers. She looks like she’s going to be sick. “No, I—you helped put him in _jail,_ I don’t—”

Her heart hurts. “Marisol—”

“ _Don’t call me that_!”

“It’s the only name I have for you!”

“Why did you tell me this?” Marisol wipes her face, and more tears streak down. “ _Why_ did you tell me this? Why did you make me think this? _Why_ —”

“You asked me to help you find your father’s killer, and I did, I—” She wants to gag. “I’m so sorry, I wish I had something better to tell you—”

“No, you _don’t_ , I lied to you, this is all probably _funny_ to you, you hate him, you hate Vanessa—”

“Marisol,” Matt says, and she ignores him. Of course she does. She doesn’t know Matt at all. She’s staring right at Darcy, and the wind whips at them all, tugging them out of joint. 

“Larks _lived in the house_!” She’s shouting, screaming. “Larks—Larks l-lived in the Boston house until I was fifteen, he _lived there_ , if Wilson—if Larks killed my father then—”

“Jesus Christ.” Darcy covers her mouth with both hands. “Jesus Christ.”

Marisol turns grey, then green. Her shoulders shake. Then, all at once, she bolts. She darts between Darcy and Ben and _runs_ , and Darcy doesn’t remember making the decision to chase her, she just does. Matt calls after her, but she doesn’t stop. The muscles in her legs scream as she slams through the gate into the abandoned warehouse, skidding over gravel, and she is so _sick_ of the local landscape trying to kill her, seriously. Someone’s shouting, but she can’t make it out over her heartbeat in her ears. Marisol’s fast, and her hairpin turns are _scary_ neat, holy hell ( _it’s Miss Ninja, of course they’re scary neat_ ), and there’s nowhere she can go without her car, not really, but goddamn if Darcy’s going to lose the one lead they’ve had to Brannigan in three days, and _if you make me chase you across fuckin’ New Jersey, Marisol Whatever Your Name Is, I swear to God_ —

“ _Stop following me,_ ” Marisol flings over her shoulder, but her face is turned away; Darcy can’t shout back at her. _Goddammit._ Her whole body hurts. _Slow down, slow down, please slow down_ —

They’re in the warehouse, now. Piles of trash and old wood. Darcy slips once, lands hard on her knee, tears her jeans and starts to bleed, but she gets up and keeps going. “Slow _down,_ Jesus Christ,” and of course Marisol doesn’t hear it, but she feels better for swearing. _And you’ve been spending too much time with Father P if ‘Jesus Christ’ counts as a swearword now._ Marisol cuts left, dives between two wheelbarrows, and Darcy vaults over one of them to skid to a stop in front of her, panting hard.

“ _Stop_ ,” she says, and Marisol whips a fist at her. Darcy ducks. “ _Shit_ , Marisol—”

“ _He lived in the house._ ” It’s not a scream, it’s a _whine_ , a whine of pain like a wounded animal might make. “ _He lived in the house_ , Wilson had him murder my father and he _lived in the house_ —”

“Marisol—”

“ _He lived in the house_.” She’s shaking, white-lipped, her hair falling out of the ponytail. Darcy puts her hands on her knees, trying to catch her breath, to keep her balance. “He lived—”

“Marisol—”

“—in the _house_ —”

“ _Marisol_ —”

“ _Wilson didn’t kill my father,_ ” Marisol says, and sobs. Her knees give out, and she hits the concrete hard, her hair tickling around her face, sticking to her cheeks. “You have—you can’t be right, you have to be lying, you _have_ to be lying—”

Darcy crouches. “I’m not.”

“You _have to be_ ,” Marisol says without looking at her. “It can’t be right, it _can’t_ be right, it can’t—” 

Darcy drops back onto her ass. Blood runs down her leg, seeps into the fabric of her jeans, and she’s dropped right into a puddle so there’s brackish water in her underwear now, but her legs hurt, she can’t crouch very long with her legs hurting the way they are, and she can’t keep her balance anyway. She kind of wants to throw up. Out of the corner of her eye she can see Ben, and Matt, Matt hanging onto Ben’s arm as they power-walk through the maze of the warehouse towards them. Her stomach’s churning. Darcy wipes her mouth, swallows until the nausea fades, and then she reaches out and rests her fingers to Marisol’s knee. Marisol lifts her head slowly, just enough to see Darcy’s face.

“What’s your name?” Darcy says.

Marisol’s throat works. She looks at the wheelbarrows, at the hole in the roof. She’s not going to answer, Darcy thinks. Then: “Maya.”

 _Maya._ “Maya Lincoln?”

Maya shakes her head. “Maya Lopez.”

 _Lopez._ Like her mother. Anita Lopez.

“You really think Wilson had my father murdered,” she says. “You think—you think he had Larks kill him. To get closer to Rigoletto so he could—” She swallows. “And—and to take me.”

“I do,” says Darcy. “Yes.”

“You hate him,” says Maya, instantly. “You hate him, all of this—all of this could be a trick.”

“I do.” Darcy stares at the ceiling for a  moment. “But I would rather it have been anything but this, Maya. I really would.”

Maya shakes her head again, and is quiet. Ben and Matt are nearly beside them, a row down and over.

“Maya,” she says, and Maya stares at her through her hair. “Why did you warn Daredevil about Brannigan coming after us?”

Her lips part. “How do you know—”

“Don’t ask,” Darcy says. “Why? You’re here to help Vanessa, to—to do whatever it is she needs you to do, why would you warn Daredevil? Why would you ask him to protect us?”

Maya looks at her for a moment, and then ducks her head. Darcy sits, and waits.

“I don’t know,” Maya says, finally. “I don’t know what to think about any of you. Brannigan just wants you dead. And I don’t agree with you and I don’t—I don’t know if I can believe you, but I don’t—I don’t want to see any of you die. Especially—especially not how Brannigan would do it.”

“Okay.” She says it to herself, more than anything. Darcy gets to her feet, puts a hand down. Maya looks at her fingers, and then up at her face, and the oddest look flickers over her mouth, across her eyes. She looks sideways at Ben and Matt, back up at Darcy. When she reaches up, catches Darcy’s wrist and pulls herself off the ground, all the tension floods out of Matt, laundry whipped away in a hurricane.

“You don’t want any of us dead,” Darcy says. “Good enough for me.”

Ben mutters something under his breath that sounds distinctly like _reckless_. Thankfully, Maya doesn’t see him speaking.

“It would help,” Matt says; Maya shifts her attention, cocking her head just a bit at the glasses, the cane, “if we knew where Brannigan was.”

She wets her lips. “If I tell you that, then—then I’ll have broken with Vanessa. Completely.”

Ben looks at Darcy, and then at Maya. “Doesn’t seem like such a bad thing to me.”

“I can’t just—” She takes a breath, heaves. “I can’t just _believe_ you. I can’t—not—not without proof, I can’t believe you without _proof,_ I can’t just—betray the people who took me in on your word.”

“If we’re wrong, then we’re wrong,” Ben says. “But if Brannigan stays out there, people are going to die. And Daredevil can’t be there all the time.”

Matt’s face is a picture. Thankfully, Maya isn’t looking at him anymore.

“If I can tell them where Brannigan is,” Ben says, “no one has to know it was you. It could have been from any of my sources. I have more than a few with what’s left of the Irish, people who could tell me without getting you involved. And no one here is going to drop the bomb. Your call, Miss Lopez.”

Maya looks from Darcy, to Matt, to Ben, to Darcy. She wipes her eyes with the tips of her fingers, looks up at the ceiling.

“Maya,” Darcy says. “ _Please._ ”

She presses the heels of her hands into her eyes this time, and stands there for a long, silent moment. Then, without lifting her head, Maya says, “Brooklyn.”

_Brooklyn. Steve Rogers would be ashamed._

“Brooklyn,” says Maya again. “He’s in Brooklyn, in an old crackhouse in Bedford-Stuyvesant. I don’t know if he’s still there, but you should be able to find someone in the area who can tell you where he went. There’s—there are a lot of Brannigans there right now.”

“I’ll pass it on to them,” Ben says, and doesn’t look at Darcy. “You can stay with me, for now. No one will look for you with me.”

Maya jitters sideways, like she’s going to bolt. “I don’t—”

“You have anywhere else to go?”

She flares her fingers out, shakes her head. “I have an apartment, but—”

 _But it’s Fisk’s_. No one says it.

“Do you need to go back and get anything?” says Ben. Maya shoves her hands into her pockets.

“No. There’s a duffel in my car.”

“Then we’ll talk on the way out.” He tips his head at Darcy and Matt. “I need to get these two back into the city.”

“We can take the train.”

“You gonna walk there?” Ben eyes her jeans. “There’s a towel in the trunk, put that on the seat before you get into my car.”

“Yes, Uncle Ben,” Darcy says, only half under her breath. Maya doesn’t quite know what to make of any of this, judging by the expression on her face. She sweeps back and forth between them, and there’s an awful lost look that makes Darcy think of a child left behind in an empty theme park. She reaches out, catches Maya’s elbow.

“If you say I did the right thing,” Maya says, in a rough voice, “I will break your nose.”

Darcy nods. “I just—you didn’t have to tell us and you did. I owe you.” She swallows. “Thank you, Maya.”

Maya jerks her head, and looks hard at the floor. “If you’re wrong, or if you were lying, then—”

She shuts up, after that, but they all know what she was trying to say, anyway. _I won’t forgive you._ Darcy nods once, and loops her arm through Matt’s.

“Noted.”

.

.

.

He wakes very slowly, with blood pouring down the back of his throat.

Finn keeps still, keeps his breathing steady. It’s a dark room, small. There’s tape on his wrists, on his ankles. No windows, from what he can tell in the instant he lets his eyes slit open. His head aches, and pounds. The last thing he remembers—Christ.

(— _gunshots and a swarm of Chinese, Shaun’s nowhere to be seen, a bullet in the wall behind him, darkness—_ )

An attack. Someone had leaked their location. _Lopez_ , the little Lopez bitch, oh-so-coincidentally off in Jersey at the most opportune moment. Triad men and women swarming through the crackhouse, silencers and switchblades. No time, and no warning, and the last thing he remembers is a gunshot from the doorway. Not exactly the first time he’s been taken prisoner, but it’s the first time he hasn’t been able to get himself out solo. _Bloody shoulder. Goddamn knee._ And his nose is broken now, too. The roof of his mouth throbs.

_When I get my hands on that traitorous little bitch—_

“About time,” says a voice. “Though to be fair, I didn’t exactly request that they be gentle.”

She sounds a bit different when the phone isn’t distorting the accent. Israeli, he thinks. Bloody fucking woman. Finn lifts his head, shifts so hair isn’t dangling in his eyes. The woman sitting across the table is small and slender, with lovely, narrow hands, a face that could unleash a fleet of ships. Her hair’s loose around her cheeks, soft curls and gold threaded through the brown. The neatness of her is a stark, bright contrast to the dank emptiness of the little room, and judging from the smell—Christ, he’s in a repurposed storage room for smack.  

“I wondered if you were going to wake up before they arrived,” Silvia says, absently. There’s something about her face that’s prickling at his memory, tugging hard at a thread that he can’t quite catch. “It would have been unfortunate if there were no show, you see.”

“The bloody fecking hell are you doing, you stupid cow?” He yanks at his wrists. Or wrist; his ruined bloody shoulder screams when he tries to yank both. “Let me out of this chair.”

Silvia clicks her teeth, and pushes back from the table. “That’s not generally the way to get someone to do something, Mr. Brannigan. It’s more polite to ask.”

“The hell is wrong with you?” Something boils up his throat that’s close to rage. When she turns away, flicks on a light, he blinks back tears. “You’re working with the Chinese?”

“No,” says Silvia. “The Chinese are working with me. Frankly it’s been a much more fruitful relationship than the one I had with you.”

His brain snaps into gear. Tape, he thinks, and with a bum leg and a bad shoulder that’ll be hell in a handbasket to get untangled from, but she’s one woman, and not obviously armed. The door’s shut, no windows. _Christ._ The walls are made of stone, and there’s nothing on the table but a laptop, the screen dark and facing him. The camera light is blinking. _What the hell is going on here?_ “You had the Chinese raid my—”

“Don’t call that absolute wasteland of a drug den a _safehouse_ , Mr. Brannigan.” She adjusts the computer ever so carefully on the table. “Though to be quite fair it did serve to keep you out of their way for a while. Until your recklessness drew them right to you.”

“This is about the bloody masks, isn’t it?” What the hell is it about her face that’s bothering him so much? “Christ, woman, let me go.”

“No,” says Silvia flatly. “You’re an idiot. You had exactly one form of currency that was of interest to me, Mr. Brannigan, and you’ve made the use of it much more difficult than it had to be.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Silvia Manfredi shifts the computer again, and taps at the space bar. “Did my father ever tell you about his parents?”

The woman’s mad. “No,” says Finn, slowly. “Assumed they were from Sicily.”

“My grandmother was an American,” says Silvia. “My great-grandmother was Sicilian, yes, but my grandmother—no. She had my father in a psychiatric hospital in 1947. Pregnant, I think, when she was committed, though nobody could ever tell me for sure. She used to be a movie star, or so they said. My grandfather told me I took after her.” She tips her head, shrugs a little. “I remember when I was small he would refuse to play any of her films in the house, because it made him too sad to see her smiling.”

 _Her face._ He’s almost caught it, where he’s seen it before. A newspaper, maybe. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“My grandmother was also the greatest physicist of the twentieth century, Mr. Brannigan,” she says. “Braver and bolder than Einstein, before she went mad. Or so he said. My grandfather rarely spoke of her, but when he did, he never stopped talking about the things she did, about how her mind was—” She pinches the air, pulls. “Something almost otherworldly.”

“Y’don’t take after her,” says Finn, and Silvia’s lips curl up.

“If you say so.” She pulls back the chair, and settles again, folding her hands on the wood. She rubs at the ring finger on her left hand like she’s missing something. “I’ve had a great deal of time to myself the past year, Mr. Brannigan. I’ve been reading about my grandmother, or what little I can find on her. Her case wasn’t well documented by SHIELD, so even Widowgate offered very little information. But from what I can tell, she had the knack for getting people to do what she wanted. If they didn’t, well—she basically ate them alive.”

Memory thunks into place in his head, gears in an engine. “Vanessa,” he says, and wrenches at the tape again. “You’re _Fisk’s_ —”

“Silvia,” says Silvia. “Silvia Vanessa Manfredi. Marianna came from my mother’s name. She died when I was small, but it seemed—apt to honor her.” She sighs. “You’ve made things difficult, you know.”

“You _fucking bitch_ , you _lied_ to me—”

“We had an agreement, Mr. Brannigan.” She removes a small pistol from underneath the table, and holds it on him. “Men, and your cooperation, in exchange for my saving your life. You’ve reneged on your end of the bargain.”

“Fucking _bitch—_ ”

“Please,” she says in disgust. “You’re being very overwrought.”

“—fucking _kill you_ —”

“No, you won’t.” She racks the pistol. “In fact, you’re going to be found dead, Mr. Brannigan, and since one or two of the men left alive inside that festering crackhouse of yours remember only that the triad attacked your hiding place—well. They’re used to me already, I think.”

 _Christ._ “You _fucking whore_ —”

“Don’t be unpleasant.” Her eyes are like an oil slick, reflective, flammable. “I don’t have the patience.”

“ _Fisk’s_ ,” he says, because he can’t stop, Silvia Manfredi, Vanessa Marianna, Fisk’s woman, _Fisk_ — “ _Liar_ —”

She fires. The bullet takes him in his good knee, and Finn _screams_ , more out of fury than pain, because _liar, liar, Fisk’s, liar_. Blood pours down his leg. Vanessa Marianna sweeps hair out of her eyes, and sighs.

“Maybe I take more after my grandmother than you think,” she says. “Now, this is what’s going to happen. I suggest you listen very carefully. I don’t want you getting it wrong again.”

.

.

.

It’s dark by the time they finally get dressed, and wander out to Bed-Stuy. Kate’s meeting them there. Well, Kate and Spider-Man are meeting them there, which is _weird_ (and may have made Foggy go into actual hysterics, because “ _you guys I love Spider-Man oh my god you have to introduce me—_ ” “I find it very insulting that your favorite masked vigilante isn’t one of us, Fog—” “He _shoots webbing_ out of his _wrists_ , Darcy, how does that compare to the pair of you getting your asses kicked every night—” “Cheers, man.”) but at this point, Darcy’s willing to accept all the help they can get. She’d been too sleepy to even make a smartass comment when Matt had made the I Am A Cat With Wet Paws face at the thought of Spider-Man tagging along.

“I don’t think we need four vigilantes to go after a dying Irish gang.”

“Matt, I’m currently living in Bed-Stuy, I claim neighborhood rights.”

“You’re in hiding in Bed-Stuy, it’s not the same.”

“Whatever, Clint lives here, which means I get Hawkeye rights. Besides, the pair of you have been on your feet for days and days, you’re going to need the backup. Just because you and Spider-Man wound up in a hissy cat fight over a random-ass drug dealer doesn’t mean—”

“That is _not_ the reason—”

“Sure it isn’t,” Kate says. “You wanna make it a party? We could bring Jess, too.”

“Jess would kill him,” Darcy says, still half-asleep from her impromptu nap (IE passing out on the couch while waiting for the sun to set). “We’re not bringing Jess.”

“You talking Brannigan or Spider-Man?”

“What do you think?”

Kate muses. “Yeah, you’re right. Spidey wouldn’t survive.”

“She’s also kind of pissed that we had her on guard duty all day and haven’t explained why yet,” says Matt, “but that’s neither here nor there.”

“I said I’d talk to her.”

“When you two get your house in order,” says Kate, “we’ll be waiting in Brooklyn.”

Darcy texts Karen on their way out, only a few words— _should have news soon, keep your phone on_ —and then peels out of her clothes to the Lilith suit, and follows Matt up onto a brownstone rooftop in Bed-Stuy. Kate’s already there, perched on the ledge and blowing bubble-gum like a pro. And there, Darcy thinks—yeah. In the shadows, that’s a webhead.

She’s always kind of startled when she sees other costumed vigilantes. Jess doesn’t wear a costume, for obvious reasons—Jess still has this thing about heroes and how she isn’t, and Darcy wants to tell her that her self-loathing doesn’t change the fact that she _is_ a damn hero, much more than Darcy is, but whatever—but like—shit. Spider-Man’s lanky and long-fingered, the reflective glass-or-plastic-or-whatever things for his eyes (she really hopes it’s some kind of unbreakable plexiglass because actual glass would go right in your eyes if shattered) catching the backwash from the city and directing it back at them. He’s not small, not by a longshot, but his body-type is much different than Matt’s, and standing across from Daredevil he looks skinny.

 _And once again, I’m the shortest person on this rooftop. Brilliant, Holmes_.

“Hey,” Kate says, and stands up. “There you are. I was wondering if you were gonna show. Finally get your ducks in a row?”

“That make you a duck?” says Darcy.

“Very funny.”

“You’d make a very majestic mallard, that’s all I’m saying.”

“Fuck off, Jemima.”

Matt says nothing. He crosses his arms over his chest.

“Uh.” Spider-Man sounds as young as he ever has. Now that she’s listening, she thinks that there might, maybe, be a little bit of an accent, but that’s just New Yorker under the words. Queens, maybe. (Eleven years, and she still mixes up Queens and Brooklyn and Staten Island sometimes. Foggy gets _very_ offended.) “Hey, man. You still mad?”

“Can we get this done?” Matt says, to Kate, not to Spider-Man. “We’re on a time limit.”

“I know, I know, I know.” Kate cracks her gum again. “The address your source gave is on the edge of tracksuit Russian shenanigans, which is probably why Brannigan and his goons have been running under the radar, people are used to white jackasses with accents hanging around in that neighborhood. But just to be clear—” She points. “Spider-Man, Daredevil, Lilith, Hawkeye. Friends.”

Spider-Man says, “I wouldn’t call that a friendly face.”

“That’s just his face,” Kate says, determinedly chipper. “N-B-D, dude.”

Matt grunts. “Can we go?”

“Uh, I mean, are we walking, or—”

Darcy blinks, and Matt’s vanished. _Game, set, match: Daredevil one, Spider-Man zero._ Somehow the mask twists into something that looks like disappointment.

“Would it help if I said I feel bad for getting in the way of the drug-dealer beatdown?” Spider-Man says. “Because I do. Like a lot.”

“He’ll get over it.” Darcy fingers the whip on her hip, and then offers a hand. “Don’t think this’ll be a regular thing, but—thanks for the assist.”

“I was here,” says Spider-Man, somewhat uncomfortably. The fabric of his gloves is ever-so-slightly sticky, for some reason. “And—yeah.”

 _And Kate was here._ She waits until Spider-Man’s turned away, and then crooks her mouth at Kate in a silent question. Katie clears her throat.

“Yeah, so—we should probably follow Hornhead.”

“ _You’re_ the one who came up with that,” Darcy says.

“Did you think it would be anyone other than me? Please.” She flicks her fingers at Spider-Man. “You go, I can run.”

“You sure?”

“You’re not swinging me through the city on a cruise,” says Kate. “Shoo.”

Spider-Man shoos. Kate doesn’t watch him go, but she’s very hyper-aware of Darcy’s attention, judging by how she keeps fiddling with the fletching on one of her arrows. She peeks at Darcy out from the edge of her sunglasses. “Is he mad?”

“He can hear you, you know.”

“I know.”

“You could just ask him, you have a receiver too.”

“Don’t question me, sassypants.”

“He’ll get over it,” Darcy says again. Matt scoffs into her headset. “You okay?”

“You think it was a bad idea that I asked Tarantula Man to help?”

“I think that you should do what you’re comfortable with,” Darcy says. “If you’re comfortable with him helping and being around, then, y’know. Whatever.”

Kate purses her lips, and looks at the next building over. “You sound tired.”

“Long day.” Darcy loops an arm through hers for a moment, and then pulls away. “We should catch up.”

“This way,” Kate says, and backs up to get a running start.

Out of all the places that they’ve had to break into over the past year—empty warehouses, burning buildings, collapsed subway tunnels (and that was an adventure, seriously, because Matt managed to get himself stuck halfway through a hole and that’s never not going to make her laugh)—houses like this one are always going to be the ones that make her skin crawl. Darcy’s firmly for if not the legalization then at least the decriminalization of recreational drugs, for multitudinous reasons (not the least of which is that she’s sick of having to bully cops and judges and juries out of arresting, charging, and giving life sentences to first-time drug offenders—who, by the way, are pretty invariably people of color, because _clearly_ white offenders get let off with a warning, thanks, America, #foreverbitter) but places like this, the chemical stench of cocaine and the human misery painted on the walls, that’s a big fat _why this should be legal_ thing. Anything to end places like this, to end devastation and desolation like this. It’s not a drug den anymore, she doesn’t think, but the accoutrements are still around, even on the roof, old stained mattresses and ruined spoons and a single worn tennis shoe left in the corner of the rooftop. Spider-Man kind of hangs back, and she thinks his lips have gone thin just judging by how the mask is folding, but then again, who knows—she can’t see all that great in this neighborhood. All the streetlights are out.

Darcy kind of wants to burst into hysterical laughter when she thinks of a helicopter getting a shot of this from overhead, four masked vigilantes standing on the roof of a crackhouse. The six AM news would fucking kill for that picture. Hell, _Ben_ would kill for that picture. She kind of feels bad that he’s back in Hell’s Kitchen with Doris (and Maya, apparently). He’d really want to see this.

“Is he here?” Kate cracks her gum, which she somehow hasn’t choked on in the run. “Or do we have to keep hunting?”

Almost in the same moment, Matt and Spider-Man tip their heads in opposite directions.

“Someone’s here,” says Spider-Man. “I don’t know who, but—someone’s here.”

“One,” says Matt, and Spider-Man’s head snaps around. “Basement.”

“Alive?” says Darcy.

“No.”

“Shit.” Only one dead body left behind in a house that had been held by Finn Brannigan: that sounds like a message, if anything does. “Fuck.”

“Anyone else?” Kate says. “Bait?”

Matt tips his head even further to the side. “No.” Pause. “There’s a computer, though. Plugged in. Might be something left to tell us where they went.”

Spider-Man somehow has managed to make the mask contort into the greatest _what the fuck_ face on the planet, and even in the face of all her exhaustion, Darcy has to bite her tongue to keep from laughing. “How the hell—”

“Dude,” says Kate, “don’t ask.”

“A dead body and a computer reads like a trap,” says Darcy, and Matt hums an agreement. “Especially if there’s nothing else left behind. You wanna pull a Manfredi with this, go two and two? Hawkeye, you want top?”

“I see better from a distance,” says Kate, in the _I’m totally mocking Clint right now_ voice. “Bruce?”

“Don’t call me that.”

“C’mon, you love it.”

Matt shakes his head.

“So Samson and Delilah on point,” says Kate. “We’ll stay up here, keep an eye out. Let us know if it’s clear to come in.”

“Probably there’ll be a lot of screaming,” says Darcy. “Shouldn’t be too hard to figure out.”

“Are you guys always like this?” Spider-Man says. “With the Bible references and the ducks? Because if you are—”

The crunch of Matt kicking in the roof access door vanquishes however _that_ statement ends. She’s not sure if she wants to know. The tone was kind of a mix between awed and horrified, so it could have gone either way. Darcy waggles her fingers, and says, “Toodles,” before leading the way down the stairs onto the third floor of the brownstone.

Sure enough: third floor, empty. Second floor, empty. The first floor has a series of bullet holes in the wall, the sharp smell of gunpowder in the air. “Fresh,” Matt says, and Darcy touches the edge of one of the punctures before drawing her hand away. “Past few hours.”

“Shit.” Blood on the floor, tacky but not completely dried. “And no cops?”

“They’d still be here if the cops had been called.”

That’s true. She rubs her fingertips together, and unwinds the whip, looping it in a loose circle around her hand. She can snap it out easily if she just lets go of the tip. _Christ, I haven’t had much chance to practice with this, please don’t let whatever fight we’re about to have get too damn complicated._ If someone cuts her new toy in half then Melvin will be so, so upset. “Basement, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“If there was a firefight in here why the hell haven’t the police heard about it?”

“Silencers, maybe.” He shrugs. “That or people just know better than to call the police out here.”

“An Avenger lives out here.”

Matt shrugs again, and that’s more than enough of an answer. Gunfire tends to happen where Avengers live. Or where any kind of vigilante lives. Eventually you just…get used to it and don’t mention it to anyone. Or assume that the vigilante will deal with it, and the cops don’t need to be called, which is worse, somehow. _We can’t stop everything. People need to stop assuming we can fix everything._ “Great.”

He tests the lock on the door to the basement, and lets it swing open. Someone’s oiled it. There’s no sound, no creak from the hinges or whine from the wall. Eerie and soft. Matt ghosts his hand over the back of her shoulder, and leads the way down.

Down below, it’s filthier. Not filthier in the way that filth usually means, not dirt and grime, but the _air_ feels dirty. Upstairs had been addiction, escape; down here is violence. The basement is blood on the floor and scattered bullet casings and a single flickering lightbulb. It’s been organized into a short hallway, one room on the left, two on the right, all doors hanging open. Drag marks, she thinks, on the floor, more pools of blood that haven’t yet had the time to dry. Matt gestures to the left-hand door with his hand, and the shimmering lightbulb leaves horned, inhuman shadows on the wall behind him. Darcy’s own shadow is something more smeared, the whip in her hand coiled like a lasso. Which makes her think of Wonder Woman. _Like I’m anything like Diana Prince, goddamn._ Only one door into the room means a bottleneck, quite probably, but when she flicks two fingers at him, points up— _the others?_ —Matt just shakes his head.

“Really hoping the silence means all’s okay down there and not that we’ve lost comms,” Kate says, almost lazily. “Though considering there’s been no screaming I’m assuming it’s the former.”

The computer is up, a light blinking at the top. A camera, Darcy thinks, looking at it. The Skype logo in the upper right-hand corner is too bubbly for the room. In the chair in front of the computer sits a man with no hands, his head tipped back to bare the gouge in his throat. This one isn’t nearly so clean as the body that had been found in the warehouse, not nearly so well-slit as O’Reardon; this is jagged, sideways, like someone had used a dull knife and no experience and just…hacked. She puts a hand to her mouth, just for a moment, and makes herself swallow. “Christ.”

“He was in the catacombs.” Matt angles his head again. “One of Brannigan’s men, one of the ones that dragged him out.”

 _With Maya._ Darcy looks at the computer screen again, at the empty room on the other side. The walls in view of the camera are whitewashed, but they haven’t been cleaned in a very long time; great smears of yellowy-brown earth streak up the walls, damage from the damp and the earth. She hits the space bar once with her thumb, and then shifts the body. It’s cool, but not cold. Rigor mortis has barely started. “Hasn’t been dead long. And—wallet. Shaun Brannigan.”

 _Jimmy_ , Brannigan had shouted. _Shaun._

“You guys okay down there?” Kate says.

“I don’t think Brannigan did this one.” Matt puts his thumb to the untouched skin just below the gash. “Not clean.”

“Unless he did it with his bad arm.” Darcy turns the computer away from the body. A PC, but there’s nothing installed on it, not outside the OS, the internet, and Skype. The rest of it’s been wiped clean. “I think someone’s supposed to be on the other side of this.”

“Smarter than you sound, Lilith,” says a voice, and then the camera view shifts. Brannigan. Brannigan, red-haired, long-faced, blood leaking down his cheek and jaw from a cut just above his eyebrow. He’s pale, freckles standing out on his skin, smeared red around his mouth. Darcy shifts her hand on her whip, and leans away from the computer. “The Devil and the Angel of Mercy.”

His voice is tight and uncomfortable. Something’s wrong. Darcy doesn’t look at Matt; she shifts the computer around again. “Figured you’d be here. Kind of sad that you kept sending us invites only to let us party alone.”

Brannigan says nothing. His lips thin out.

“This you?” She doesn’t touch the body of Shaun Brannigan, just gestures to it, angling away so she doesn’t step in the blood on the floor. “Seems sloppy for you, Smiling Finn.”

He shakes his head. “Not sayin’ your bloody words for you.”

“What?” says Darcy, but at her shoulder Matt’s stiffened like a spike. Her blood turns to ice, all at once, when the camera adjusts. Brannigan hasn’t moved his hands. “Brannigan, who’s there with you?”

“Will you save him?” says a voice. If she hadn’t spent the day chasing Maya, she’d recoil like she’d been punched in the stomach. As it is, Vanessa’s barely a blip, now. _Back, she’s back, she’s back,_ and the camera could be coming from anywhere, she doesn’t know how to trace Skype calls back to their origin point, and if Vanessa’s any kind of smart she’d use an IP cycler anyway so what does it matter, stop thinking, Darcy, stop _thinking—_ “After all, haven’t you been looking for this one?”

“Vanessa,” says Darcy. She keeps her voice neutral, somehow. “I thought you and Finn were friends. Not Bonnie and Clyde, maybe, but like—Turner and Hooch.”

“Not in particular.” She doesn’t come around within view of the camera, Vanessa. She stands behind it, out of sight. “You sound unwell, Lilith, have you been sleeping enough?”

 _Christ._ “What’d Shaun Brannigan ever do to you, Vanessa?” Darcy swallows. “Only this seems kinda overkll, considering.”

“Really? I thought it seemed poetic.” She hums. “Besides, the hands were Maya’s idea. I considered it, and thought—why not apply it to _all_ Brannigans? Considering the whole family seems equally boorish.”

Brannigan hisses through his teeth.

Matt says, “What do you want, Vanessa?”

“Look at that, Brannigan was telling the truth. I didn’t think I’d get this sort of VIP treatment.” Vanessa hums again. “The Devil _and_ the Angel. I’ve moved up in the world, apparently. Last time it was only the one of you.”

“Quit the bullshit,” Darcy snaps. “What do you _want_?”

“To say hello, mostly.” The camera shifts again, but there’s still no hint of her. “Which is vexing. I wouldn’t have had to do it this way if Mr. Brannigan here had actually been paying attention to the rules, but you can’t put toothpaste back in the tube, as it were. Besides, it’s not as though you haven’t already heard the whole story from Maya, anyway.”

 _Thump_ goes her heart in her chest. _Shit._ “Am I supposed to know who that is?”

“You’re a very bad liar, Lilith.”

In the chair, Brannigan’s eyes flick back and forth, tracking something they can’t see. Darcy’s hands are shaking. She keeps them hidden behind her back. At her side, Matt shifts, uncomfortably.

“You’ve been busy,” says Vanessa. “Finn here has been telling me a great deal of what’s been going on in the city since I left. It seems like the pair of you haven’t handled things as well as you thought you could.”

“Come and say that to my face.” Darcy knocks her fist into Matt’s behind the chair. “You were brave enough last time. What’s with the computer?”

“Mm, no.” She still hasn’t come within range of the camera, goddammit. “When you see me, Lilith, it’ll be the moment you and your Devil die, and not before.”

It’s not a croon, or a whine, or a command. It’s just a statement of fact. _It’ll be the moment you and your Devil die, and not before._ All the hair on her body stands on end.

( _Bang,_ and Matt falls—)

“Because killing us will create the city that you want so badly?” says the Devil. “Fisk is in jail, Vanessa. The conspiracy’s gone. Your empire is over. There’s nothing left for you to scrounge.”

“You have no idea what’s coming.” Vanessa—shit. Vanessa sounds like she’s _smiling._ “You have no idea. You’ve been the little devils on my shoulder for the past year and yet _I_ know more than you do about what the whole of New York is about to face. You have to appreciate the irony in that, truly you must. ”

 _Shit._ “What the hell are you talking about?”

“You think I’m about to spoil the surprise?” There’s a glint of something metallic on the top right hand corner of the feed. Brannigan’s at war with himself, shifting, and the look on his face is pure _poison_ , holy shit, he’s looking at Vanessa like he wants her dead, and he wets his lips down, smearing blood with his tongue. “Please.”

“Vanessa—”

“She’s here,” Brannigan says all of a sudden, and yanks at the arms of the chair. “She’s in the city and she’s working with—”   

It happens in a second. Brannigan’s talking, and then half his head is gone. Blood spatters the camera. Darcy can’t help it—she shrieks, and recoils from the screen, hand over her mouth. The body lies there, rocking sideways. Matt seizes her elbow, holds on for an awful, painful, tangled moment. Then he lets go. Vanessa laughs, low in her throat.

“Please, Lilith, you had to have known that was coming. It’s half the reason I called you.”

“You called me to make me watch you shoot someone?”

“To make it absolutely clear what happens to people who go against me.”

Shit. _Shit._

“If you were looking for Brannigan’s men to be loyal to you,” says Matt, “you’re really not going to like what they try to do to you now.”

“Like anyone would believe it if you told them,” says Vanessa, lightly. “Besides, what happens to Mr. Brannigan’s men is no concern of yours, _Daredevil._ It’s not the first time I’ve collected people that have been left adrift by your intrusions.”

“Uh, guys,” says Kate, “I think we have some cops incoming. I see flashing lights.”

“You could take the computer,” says Vanessa, “but there’s nothing on it, really. And tell Maya that Wilson’s very disappointed in her.”

The feed cuts out before either of them can say a word.

.

.

.

The phone rings.

“This is Tower.”

“Any word on the jury selection?”

“Other than the first batch of options comes in on Monday, no.”

“Let me know the instant you hear anything.”

“Yes, ma’am.” A pause. “Miss Reyes—”

“I don’t need to hear your questions again, Blake. Jen left.”

“That wasn’t what I was going to say.”

“Then what were you going to say?”

He sighs. “Just that—people are asking questions. If they think to ask Jen—”

“There’s a reason why I requested you help me with certain aspects of this situation, and not Miss Walters.”

“I’m aware of that, believe me. But if she—”

“Jennifer isn’t going to connect the dots. And even if she does, she wouldn’t dare come forward.”

“It’s not like she has anything to lose if she does, considering she’s already resigned.”

“No,” says Reyes. “Just her reputation. If it were to come out that she were complicit—”

“She wasn’t.”

“But if it _did_.”

Another pause.

“Walters won’t be a problem unless she makes herself into one,” says Reyes. The door opens, and Angie slips in with a few more files, settling them on the side of his desk. “You’re not getting squeamish, are you, Mr. Tower?”

“No, ma’am.” He waves Angie off. “I’ll let you know if anything new comes in about the scheduling.”

Reyes hangs up without another word. In the doorway, Angie stands like a sentinel, her monkey settled on her shoulder like a parrot. She eyes him, for a moment, inscrutable.

“What,” says Blake.

“Nothing,” says Angie. “Don’t make me bring files up here again. I’m not a damn secretary.”

“Technically you are.” He sorts through a folder. “I’ll call if I need anything else.”

The monkey chitters something unhappy-sounding.

“You’re staring,” says Blake. He looks down at his paperwork. “What wisdom do you want to dispense from on high, Angie? I don’t go in for koans, much.”

“You’re a fucking idiot,” says Angie, and then she’s gone. She’s left the door of his office open. Blake has to stand, and shut it himself, and when he does he rests his head against the wood and breathes. The burner phone Ben Urich gave him months ago is weighing like a bomb in his back pocket.

_I wish none of us had ever heard the name Frank Castle._


	16. You Break It

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WOW OKAY I HAVE BEEN GONE FOR FUCKING MONTHS I'M SO SORRY GUYS
> 
> My brain was eaten by Rogue One, obviously (I feel like some of you jumped on the Rebelcaptain ship with me whoops) and then I was applying to law schools and wrapping up all my obligations in Japan and then actually moving _back_ to the US and my brain has been Braining and it was just a shitshow??? So thank you for being so goddamn patient with me. 
> 
> Also! Apologies for not responding to all the comments. ;_____; My anxiety just ramped up like wow and I did not have the mind to do it for....eight months?? So. 
> 
> On with the show!

Darcy crashes as soon as they get back to the apartment.

It’s less a matter of choice and more a matter of _done._ She’s done. Her brain is done. Her body’s done. They slide back in through the roof access door and barely five minutes later she’s asleep on the couch. She only wakes up just long enough to realize that Matt’s carried her to the bed and helped her peel off the suit before she’s out again, too deep to dream, too deep to remember her nightmares. She’s _done,_ and Vanessa is just the icing on the cake.

( _Bang,_ and Matt falls—)

( _Tell me what you have found out about the Black Sky._ )

( _I am going to kill you._ )

( _When you see me, it’ll be the moment when you and your Devil—_ )

She wakes up at about four in the morning and lies there for a little while, listening to Matt sleep. Because he _is_ asleep, next to her, lying on his side with his back to her, not jostling once when she turns and curls around him, presses up against his spine and hides her nose in his neck and breathes. Trust, and love, and she should lie awake, her brain should snap into overdrive with everything they have to fix, but instead she just falls back to sleep. It’s like after Fisk fell, and her whole body had turned into shut-down mode, everything closing itself off until she finally, justifiably, can no longer remain unconscious.

The light in the room has turned afternoon yellow when she finally opens her eyes again. Her mouth is pure cat fur. Darcy licks her lips, swallows, swallows again, and stares hard at the ceiling to try and get her eyes to uncross. “ _Christ._ Did someone drug me?”

“No.” The mattress shifts under Matt’s weight as he settles on her left, strokes a hand down her cheek. “You were just tired.”

“I’m not usually _this_ tired.” Afternoon yellow, or evening orange, she can’t make out which right now. “Shit, what time is it?” 

“Almost six.”

“PM?”

“Yeah.” He brushes hair back out of her eyes. “Sleep okay?”

“I feel hungover.” She doesn’t budge. “Were you sitting here the whole time?”

“Went to the firm this morning, brought work back.” Which explains the papers rustling over her feet. “Foggy’s going to stop by in a few hours to grab what I’ve finished. I’ve been talking to him on the phone most of the day.”

 _I slept through all that?_ Holy shit. “I’m not—”

“It’s six in the evening, there’s no point in you getting up.”

“But—”

He shifts papers around. “Kate and her new friend are keeping an eye on things tonight.”

…well then. “Was that your idea or Kate’s?”

“Foggy’s, actually,” Matt says, only slightly put out about it. “He threatened to fire us both if we left the apartment tonight.”

“Would’ve figured you’d still want to go out on patrol.” She swallows. “Since Vanessa’s back.”

Matt rubs a hand over his mouth, and goes back to collecting files, swaying sideways to rest them on the floor by the bed. “I would, normally, but I’m pretty sure he meant the thing he said about firing us. And I kind of need to pay rent.”

“Loser,” Darcy says, half-asleep and suddenly, overwhelmingly fond. She’s still kind of numb from how hard she’d slept when she reaches out, and hooks two fingers into his sleeve. “Who needs money when there’s vigilantism?”

“Generally the supermarket does,” says Matt.

“Don’t get logical on me, sir.” She pulls. “Did Foggy at least get to meet his hero?”

“Not yet, but I think if he doesn’t soon he’s going to murder us all.”

“Aw, Mattcat, are you jealous?”

He pinches her wrist. “Shut up.”

“Make me.” Darcy curls. “Did you find anything for Frank?”

“More little things to poke holes in. If we’re lucky we might be able to use all of them together to put a dent in her case.” He collects the last few files, sets them on the floor, and shuffles around until he’s on his side next to her, propped up on one elbow with his knee knocking into hers. “Which we’re not talking about right now.”

 _That’s not suspicious at all, Matthew._ “So we’re talking about Vanessa?”

“No.”

“Not Vanessa, not Frank, not Reyes, I’m assuming not Maya—Maya, is Maya—”

“She’s still with Ben,” he says. “I didn’t speak to her. Haven’t mentioned what Vanessa said.”

“—and not the yakuza either—”

“Definitely not yakuza. Or anything related.”

“So—what are we talking about, then?”

“Up to you.” He shifts again, and pets at her hair. “And if you fall back to sleep I won’t be offended.”

She’s not sure if she should be exasperated or not. “I’ve been asleep on and off for nearly eighteen hours, I don’t think I need any more.” She reaches up, touches his cheek. “Did you sleep?”

“From about midnight to eight.” His ears go pink. “And from two to five or so.”

Something in her unwinds a bit. “Okay.”

Matt’s quiet, for a moment. “You scared me. Yesterday.”

“With Maya?”

He shakes his head, and then settles with his head on the pillow. Aside from a forefinger to the back of her wrist, he doesn’t touch her. Darcy turns onto her side to face him, her head kind of buzzing from sleep, and rests her fingers to his sternum.

“We’ve kind of been bad at this lately,” she says, “haven’t we?”

His lips turn down. “Sorry.”

“Not just you.” She’s hollow, ringing like a struck bell. Darcy hooks one finger into the collar of his shirt. “Though from now on I can’t be so much of a holier-than-thou asshole about falling into the trap of thinking it’s easier to handle something solo. Once you start the slide it’s—hard to get back up.”

“You stopped yourself.”

“Yeah, because you called me on it before I could get more than two feet down the slope.” Which is a miracle in and of itself. “Foggy’s rubbed off on you.”

Matt presses her fingers to his chest for a moment, shifts his hand away. “We pull each other back,” he says. “It’s what we’re supposed to do.”

 _Hurt me with kindness, damn you._ “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t need to apologize.” He wets his lips. “Out of the two of us you’re—you’re definitely not the one that needs to apologize.”

“You’re doing that thing,” she says. “The taking-on-all-the-blame thing that Claire hates. And that I hate, and Foggy hates. Don’t do the hair-shirt thing.”

Matt laughs. “I don’t think she’s ever going to let go of that.”

“Or self-flagellation, she likes that metaphor too.” She curls just a bit closer. “I should call and check on her. The hospital should have calmed down by now, she’s probably worried.”

“Call her tomorrow. You need to sleep.”

“I’ve slept for eighteen hours.” And she really doesn’t want to get out of bed right now, but that’s something else entirely. “You need it too. Still. There are rings under your eyes.”

“I will,” he says, but he doesn’t turn his face away. Darcy closes her eyes. She forgets sometimes how powerful it can be to just _look_ at someone. She’s used to it, and then she’s not, all at once. “After you sleep, I will.”

She nods. Her throat’s too swollen and uncomfortable to say anything.

“If you’re not up to it,” Matt says, “then it’s okay, it’s—it’s fine. We don’t have to talk about it right now, not until you feel like you can. But I don’t—” He wets his lips. “I know—why. What happened with Frank, that was—if you felt like you couldn’t talk to me after, I know why. I get it. But—”

He stops. Darcy rests her hand to his cheek, and looks at him for a moment, swallowing the sight of him. “It’s not that—” She has to swallow. “I just—didn’t—I don’t know. It was hard, right after Frank, with Elektra, and I didn’t—want to make things harder.”

“For me,” he says, and there’s a look on his face that—hell. It could wreck her if she lets it. “If—even if you feel like you couldn’t talk to me, you could have—Jen—”

“I was fighting with Jen.”

“Foggy, then,” he says. “Or Karen, or Claire, or Kate, even Jess—”

“You think Jess would be up for heart to hearts?” She shrugs. Matt touches a thumb to her cheek. “And Karen’s—Karen’s having a hard enough time right now, and Foggy’s stressed, and Claire’s working, and Kate’s under threats of death, so—”

“So that means you don’t tell anyone at all?”

 _Ouch. Alert, inform the bridge there’s a puncture in the hull._ “I talked to Father P. A little. Once. About—about some parts. The other parts, I didn’t—” She bites her lip. “I just didn’t want to make things harder.”

“Darcy—” He puts a hand to his mouth, drops it again. “Christ.”

“I’m—”

“Don’t say you’re sorry.”

“I told you,” she says. “I don’t—I’m _not good_ at saying things, I don’t ever know _how_ , I don’t—”

He feathers his fingers over her throat. “Darcy—”

“And I know how hypocritical it is of me to say that when I’m constantly pushing and pushing and trying to get everyone to talk about things that bother them but I don’t—I don’t know _how_ , Matt, I’ve always been—I’m the one that helps other people, I’m good at helping other people, I should be able to manage all of it alone—”

“You don’t have to do it alone,” he says. “You told me that, remember? A year ago. Neither of us have to be alone anymore.”

She hiccups. _I will not cry, damn it_ , but it’s kind of too late, considering how the pillow feels under her cheek. When Matt slides under the covers, she burrows in, and hides her nose in his shirt. He’s showered, at least, and he’s shaved, and he’s wrapped an arm close enough around her that it’s like an iron bar pressed into her back. Not a cage, but like—like a handrail. A fence meant to keep her from tipping over the edge.

“Tell me.” He rests his nose and mouth to her hair. “If you feel like you can, tell me. You’re not—you won’t make things harder for me if you tell me. It makes things harder when you don’t.”

“That sounds familiar.”

“I don’t know, the person who told me that’s pretty smart.” She can hear the smile, more than feel it. “One of the smartest people I know.”

“Not the smartest?”

“Who knows. She’s just been pounding it into my head lately that it’s better to talk about things than not. Figured it might help.”

And isn’t this a trip, getting her own advice parroted at her. Trippy and kind of sad, because if anyone should know this it should be her, but somehow it’s—it’s not new, exactly, but it’s not known, either. It’s somewhere in between. “I’m—it’s—I don’t know. It’s a lot.”

The teasing’s done, now. The softness isn’t. “I can handle a lot.”

“I just don’t—” _Breathe. Breathe._ “I don’t want to make it worse. Not any of it, not—not us or what’s happening or—or any of it. I don’t want to break anything.”

“You won’t,” he says, and she believes him, for some reason. “You—you needing help is never going to make things worse.”

Darcy hiccups again, and shuts her eyes. “I don’t—”

“You won’t make things worse,” says Matt, very quietly. “You don’t scare me.”

“That sounds familiar too.”

“There’s a certain irony.” He scuffs his fingers over her shoulder blade. “Somehow we always have these conversations in bed and I have to appreciate the running theme.”

She doesn’t laugh. Darcy settles her nose against the dip between his collarbones, breathes in.

“Let me help you,” he says, and something cracks to pieces in her mouth. “Please, Darcy.” 

It comes slowly, at first, chip by excruciating chip. She has to stop for minutes at a time, breathing, before she can continue. Frank and the phone calls. The anxiety, the nerves. The utter sense that something’s wrong with her, though what she’s not entirely sure. Somewhere around Grotto and Father P, she cracks through the dam. Then it’s faster, lower, Elektra, the Black Sky, the graffiti and the nightmares, Karen, Jen, Foggy, Marisol and Reyes and Vanessa and Matt, all of it in a flood, pieces tumbling out sidelong, never quite meshing together into one narrative, jumping and leaping like salmon in rapids. _Bang,_ Matt falling, all of it spiraling back to that one moment, the world falling away from under her feet and not coming back right. Not just the fear, really, but also everything that had come after, shaking the foundations. Terror, and a rage she hasn’t felt since she was a child, the fury she couldn’t control, the monster she couldn’t handle, scrambling to fix everything, scrabbling to make it better. _It’s so easy to lose everything in a split fucking second._  

It’s a long, long time before she stops. Matt keeps quiet, twisting a strand of her hair through his fingers. He hasn’t shifted his mouth from her hair. Darcy sniffs, and then says, “I’m a fucking mess.”

“You’re not.” He clears his throat, rasping. “You’re—you aren’t a mess.”

“How can you hear all of that and not think I’m a mess?”

Matt shakes his head. “Can I ask something?”

“Oh, god,” she says, miserably. “What?”

He’s silent for a while longer. He’s still rasping and hoarse and wrecked when he says, “From now on, if—if you start feeling overwhelmed, will you please tell me?”

The dip between his collarbones is sharper than usual. He hasn’t been eating enough. Darcy swallows back the automatic _I’m okay,_ presses her mouth to that spot.

“Do you want me to say something?” Christ, she didn’t mean to make Matt cry. She thinks he might be crying. There’s a damp spot on her hair that isn’t explicable otherwise. “Like how you do, with me. If I think you—you’re trying to take on too much alone. Do you think it would help?”

“I don’t—” She stops, takes a ragged breath. “I don’t know, maybe. I don’t know what you would say.”

“Whale shark,” Matt says, and she chokes on her laugh.

“Foggy and Karen will be confused.”

Matt shifts, and puts his mouth to her forehead. “I don’t care if they get confused.”

She can’t speak for a little bit. Darcy breathes, in and out. “Do _you_ think it would help?”

“It helps me,” he says. “But that’s—it’s up to you if it would help you.”

Darcy weighs that in her head for a while. She can’t trust her voice, right now. She nods, and presses in close to him. She can’t make words come, anymore. She’s torn between crying more, and sleeping more, and she might do either or she might do both, but—

“Neither of us are alone,” Matt says again, and she squeezes her eyes shut. “You have me. Okay? I’m not going anywhere.”

“I know, but—” Goddammit. “I don’t know. I’m not much of a firework. Lately.”

Matt makes a soft sound in the back of his throat, and rolls onto his back, drawing her with him. He finds her face with both hands. “Listen to me,” he says, and she shuts her eyes, because he’s so raw, right now, raw and blazing and brighter than she’s ever seen him before. “You haven’t lost anything. You haven’t _changed._ I know it doesn’t feel that way, but you’re what you’ve always been, and that’s—” He touches his thumb to her lip. “You’re still lights in the dark. You’re still home. You’ve always been home. That’s not going to change, not from any of this.”

The overload is too much. She turns her head, puts her lips to the palm of his hand, covers it with hers and presses his fingers to her cheek and holds on. _Home_. She’s shaking. _You’re my home,_ she thinks, and kisses his hand again, his fingers. _You’re home for me. I would die for you and kill for you and do anything for you, you’re back and you’re home and I love you and you make me a better person,_ and her cheeks are wet all over again when he threads her hair up out of her face.

“You’re okay,” he says, and _God_. She hurts. “I’m not going anywhere. You’ll be okay.”

Darcy rests her head to his chest, and shuts her eyes.

.

.

.

She has to sit there and fret with her fingernails for a full minute before she can swallow, and say, “Finn Brannigan’s dead.”

Frank doesn’t blink. He hasn’t blinked since she walked in, she’s pretty sure, which would scare her if she had been able to meet his eyes for more than a second at a time. She probably won’t be able to meet anyone’s eyes today, not really. She wonders sometimes if Matt can smell the guilt on her, from shit like this. Sometimes now when she passes him he gets this really odd look, this really—like he’s missing something, or confused about something. He thinks she hasn’t noticed, but she has. She just hasn’t wanted to bring it up.

_Or you’re too scared to._

“How?”

Karen jumps. Frank clears his throat, and just barely shifts his hands on the blanket. He looks away from her, towards the wall. She has to fight the urge to dip her head and let her hair fall in front of her eyes when she says, “He was shot.”

He says nothing. The air’s gone cold.

“He was working with a woman named Vanessa Marianna.” There’s no flicker, no reaction. She settles her hands on her skirt. Her index fingernail is ragged and torn, red at the corners. Karen folds her hands together to hide it. “Wilson Fisk’s fiancée. Apparently she’s the one who sent reinforcements back in the catacombs so Brannigan could get free. We still don’t know why they started working together, but we’re guessing the relationship went bad pretty fast. We nearly had him, and she—she took him. And shot him in the head.”

( _—really think this is the first time_ —)

“We bein’ you and Cat,” he says. “And Red too, I’d guess.”

There’s a distant pain in her hand. When Karen looks down, she realizes she’s picking at the base of her thumbnail. Blood streaks over the cuticle. “Yeah.”

“That why you haven’t been here in three days?” He still won’t look at her. “Because Brannigan cropped back up? They ask you to keep away from the hospital?”

“Not exactly.” She pops her knuckles. “They asked me not to tell you that Brannigan was active, to make sure that you wouldn’t get your ass shot. But I didn’t want to lie to you, so I just…didn’t show up.” She swallows. “I gave them three days. Told them if they couldn’t find him before then, I was telling you anyway.”

“And now Brannigan’s dead.”

“Yeah, well, that wasn’t in the plan.”

Frank goes quiet again.

“I didn’t want to lie to you,” she says. “I’m sorry.”

“Bullshit.”

“Truth.”

“ _Bullshit_.”

“Don’t you raise your goddamn voice at me!”

“When the hell—”

“Shut up and listen for a second, Frank—”

“Brannigan,” says Frank, in a voice like an avalanche, “was _mine_.”

“Yeah, he was.” There’s blood under her fingernail. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”

“Sorries don’t mean shit.”

“Don’t be an asshole,” says Karen, hard as stone. “You have a right to be pissed—”

“—had no damn right to keep it from me—”

“ _Frank_.” She’s up out of her chair, and she can’t remember standing. He’s death-pale, white around the mouth like the belly of a fish. “Listen to me, damn you, you’re smarter than this—if you’d gone after Brannigan you’d never have been able to find the people who organized the whole thing in the first place, you’d have been killed and you’d have lost your chance to find out anything else, they’d have—”

“—should’ve killed him when I had the fucking chance—”

There’s a banging on the door. Frank shuts up immediately, turning his face away from her. Brigid pokes her head in, face hard. “Everything all right in here?”

Karen’s suddenly, fiercely glad that she hadn’t shifted the chair beyond the tape today. “We’re fine, Brigid, thank you.”

Brigid drums her nails against the edge of the door. “Watch the line.”

“Of course.”

Slowly, inexorably, the door clicks shut again. Karen waits until she’s certain Brigid isn’t listening in, and then crosses the tape.

“Frank.” He won’t look at her. She drops down onto the edge of the hospital bed, and his jaw goes tight. “Look, it was shit, okay? It was shit of us to keep it from you, but we have to look at the big picture here. Brannigan was a small fish and there is a much, much bigger pond out there— _hey_!” Karen puts her hand on his arm. “Frank, hey. Look at me.”

For a moment, she thinks he won’t. Then, slowly—and he’s very slow, now, almost still, his lungs barely shifting even as his hands clench up into fists—he lifts his eyes to her. Karen doesn’t lean back.

“You wanna hate me for not saying anything right away, go right ahead.” Her throat squeezes, though, at the thought; her throat squeezes and her palms are suddenly sweaty and there’s a heavy weight in her ribs, like someone’s wound chains around her guts, at the thought that Frank Castle would hate her. _Deservedly, really._ “You want to run off half-cocked and get yourself killed over a man like Finn Brannigan, then you go right ahead, I don’t give a shit, but if you think—”

“Brannigan—”

“ _Brannigan is not the enemy here_ ,” Karen says, and digs her nails into his forearm. “Brannigan didn’t orchestrate any of it. Whoever did that, _they’re_ still out there. Use your goddamn head and stop yelling at me for something I didn’t do.”

“You didn’t say a goddamn word, you _hid_ —”

“I stayed away,” Karen says, her voice shaking, “because the last thing I want to do is lie to you. Big picture, Frank. I told you, you wanna find out who killed your family? You have to work with us. For Christ’s sake, Frank, _think_ —you kill Brannigan, you get yourself into even deeper shit than you’re already in, and we’re no closer to figuring out what the hell happened that day. Brannigan wasn’t the one to rig your house with security, or put a DNR on you, or threaten your damn nurses, or blackmail the medical examiner. Brannigan was just a guy holding a gun.” She pushes harder. “So _shut up_ and use your goddamn brain.”

Frank’s teeth are bared. There ought to be blood on them, she thinks. A skull smeared with red. “He was _mine_.”

“And you’re not stupid.” Karen shakes him, just a little. For some reason, he lets her do it. “ _Think._ For five minutes. Whether it’s the DA or someone beyond that, we _cannot_ find the truth if you’re dead. And I know you know that.”

He shifts under her hand. It feels, she thinks, like holding back a volcano, pressing stone together and hoping the magma doesn’t spurt free. Frank doesn’t blink, or look away from her, and suddenly she realizes that she’s leaning halfway across the bed and that her face is less than a handspan from his. Karen bites the inside of her lip until it stings, and doesn’t sway back.

“I told Cat,” he says, not shifting. “I’m not her fuckin’ crusade.”

“She wanted to keep you from getting yourself killed.” Karen blows air out her nose. “Same way the rest of us do.”

“Your hedgehog boy didn’t seem too fussed.”

“Foggy might not like you very much, but he doesn’t want you dead.” She draws her hand away, settles it back in her lap. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. If you want me to go, I can.”

Frank’s very quiet. The wordlessness trickles into something like falling stones, sending ripples out through her skin until finally Karen lifts her head to find him watching her. Her tongue plasters to the roof of her mouth, and suddenly she thinks— _shit._ _Don’t go down this road. Not with this man, especially not right now._ It’d be the last thing she needs, at the moment. She forces herself to hold steady, to not blink, not look away.

“Could’ve just lied,” he says, finally. “Why stay away?”

There’s a veritable mile of things she could say. _Because to find the truth, we have to use it. Because it was right. Because I didn’t have the guts._ None of them ring quite right. “God.” She folds her hands together, sets them to her lips for a moment. “I’m—shit.”

Frank cocks his head, and waits.

“I pulled a gun on a friend a few days ago,” Karen says. “I was—I was looking out at the ocean and he came up behind me and he scared me, I thought—I thought I was alone. And I pulled a gun on him. I nearly shot him and all he did was say hello. Out there, I don’t—everything’s shifting, everything’s—it feels like everything’s changing and I don’t know how to stop it. Things are happening that I can’t—I can’t prevent. At—at work, to the people I love, there’s—” She presses her thumbs to the space between her eyebrows. “Out there there’re a million different things I need to do, to—to find, to hide, but—but in here I don’t need to do any of that. I can exist. You’ve—I never have to worry about you lying to me. I didn’t want to drag lies in here with me. So I just—didn’t come at all.”

The clock echoes, out of sync. The battery’s dying. There’s too much time between ticks, the second-hand slowing to something uneven and strange. Frank coughs. “What kind?”

Karen blinks at him, slowly. She peers through her hair. “What?”

“What kind of gun you pull on him?”

“Oh.” She bites her lip. “A .380.”

Frank hums. “You carry it with you everywhere?”

“Generally.” She fusses with her knuckles again. “I mean, I can’t, to court, or—or into the hospital. And once you’re transferred I won’t be able to bring it there. But—yeah. Outside of that, pretty much everywhere.”

He hums again, and falls quiet.

“I’ve had enough of people lying to me,” Karen says. “I’ve had enough of lying at all. I didn’t want to lie to you. So I didn’t come. It was shitty and I’m sorry, but it’s—it was the only thing I could think to do. If you want me to stop coming in—”

“No, ma’am,” says Frank. The corner of his mouth hitches up, just a little. “Come as often as you like. Just fine by me.”

The smile feels shaky and uneven on her mouth. Karen hooks her hair behind her ears with both hands. “Yeah,” she says, and clears her throat. There’s still blood under her fingernail, but she isn’t picking at the skin anymore. “Okay.”

There’s the faintest touch on the back of her elbow. When she turns to look, his hands haven’t shifted from the bedspread.

“Let’s talk character witnesses,” she says.

.

.

.

_One week later._

“Are you kidding?” says Foggy. “No.”

Darcy’s pretty sure that Batzer’s about to come over the table at all of them, and they’re only on day four. _Poor, poor Batzer._ She’s a good judge, for this case in particular, but just— _poor Bazter._

Okay, not exactly _poor Batzer._ Batzer probably knew she was going to be in for a shitshow with the People vs. Frank Castle, especially considering the Punisher being plastered all over the newspapers and the _complete impossibility_ of finding an unbiased jury and the District Attorney herself heading up prosecution with one of her Supreme Mugwumps as cross. But good goddamn if Reyes hasn’t fretting at literally _every single juror_ like she’s trying to wear holes in socks with her teeth. The ones Nelson, Murdock & Lewis are good with? Reyes finds faults. And of course (as Angie predicted) Reyes isn’t exactly pushing for the least-biased (or least obviously biased) jurors of the pack. _One-hundred-eighty-three potentials so far, only four chosen._ And those four are still somewhat up for debate, if Reyes decides to get a bee in her ass about Number Thirty-Nine again.

Reyes, Darcy decided around Potential Juror 127, is actually just trying to get Franklin Percy Seamus Nelson to murder her in cold blood right in the middle of the courtroom floor, and at this point, Darcy’s not too inclined to stop it from happening.

Batzer rubs at her temples. “Watch it, Mr. Nelson.”

“Sorry, Your Honor.” Foggy shuts his notebook, and knocks his knuckles to the tabletop. “Just—aside from his rather palpable bias, which my colleague has already pointed out rather eloquently—”

Matt doesn’t incline his head, but he’s practically preening with how pleased with himself he looks.

“—I’m going to have to say that the defense strongly objects to one-eighty-three just on the basis of the fact that the guy’s a neo-Nazi.”

Karen chokes on her coffee, and puts it down very fast. 

Tower blinks once, slowly. “You’re not serious.”

“Did you see the inside of his wrist?” Foggy shakes his sleeve back, taps his pulse point. “Swastika, right there. Now, not that I have anything against tattoos—”

Batzer cocks an eyebrow; Darcy matches her. She knows for a fact Batzer has a tattoo of her own behind her right ear; she’d seen it when she’d run into the woman in the hallway last week. Interlocking gears, very cool. She’s not sure _Foggy_ knows that, but…still.

“—but he’s already demonstrated his bias in the interview, even outside of his politics. Which I understand don’t affect his ability to stand as a juror, but in this case? Overly influenced, one way or the other. Which—” Foggy blows hair out of his eyes “—to be entirely frank is not what any of us want.”

“Really,” Tower says under his breath.

“ _Enough_ ,” says Batzer. “If you people can’t spend more than five minutes in the same room without sniping at each other like elementary schoolers, then I swear to God, I will make every single one of you regret ever setting foot in a law school classroom.”

“Yes, Your Honor,” says Matt, and steps on Darcy’s foot before she can respond. When Batzer stands, Darcy seizes Matt by the elbow, and yanks him up with her.

“I’m done with this for the day,” says Batzer. “I want this _done_ by Friday. A full week and only four jurors is pathetic, all of you.”

“Yes, Your Honor,” says Darcy and Reyes together. Darcy peeks at her sidelong, but Reyes has a stone-face on, a smile pinned to her mouth. “We understand.”

“Nine AM tomorrow,” says Batzer. “God help me. Get out.”

They get.

“I think Reyes actually wants to scoop out your eyes with her takeaway spork,” says Karen, meeting them at the doors. She’d snagged most of the files and left before anyone else, bouncing on the balls of her feet like a jogger on a street corner. “It’s kind of awesome, Foggy.”

“Yeah, well, any time either one of you want to go toe to toe with the Bulldog, that would be great.”

“Hey, I argued for like half an hour about Number Eighty-One.” Eighty-One had been an older woman who’d gone on a ten minute rant about the ethics of vigilante justice and honestly would probably have been super interesting to talk to over drinks, but as a juror…no. Reyes had been for, Darcy against, and Darcy had won, and she _will_ rub that in Reyes’s face as frequently as she manage for as long as she can get away with it. “Also, can we please acknowledge the irony that Reyes has been shifted from Cersei to Churchill nicknamewise? Because I feel like that’s kind of great.”

Foggy sweeps hair out of his eyes again. It’s getting too long, Darcy thinks, and reaches out without thinking, fussing with a strand that’s flipped into an odd kind of bedhead-style thing. Foggy doesn’t notice. “Whatever. Batzer wants all our livers on plates, so I’m slightly more intimidated by that.”

“Batzer and Moustakas go out for drinks sometimes if that’s any kind of consolation as to the liver thing.”

“How is that any consolation?”

“I don’t know. Some kind of indicator that she has a soul and needs drinks after dealing with Reyes the same as the rest of us?” Darcy heaves her bag up higher over her shoulder. “Return of the Iron Nelson.”

Karen shakes her head. “Iron Nelson?”

“Nobody ever, ever, ever wanted to go up against any of us during mock-trials, but people were _scared_ of Foggy.” Darcy tips her head, knocks it to Foggy’s shoulder just for a second. “Our graduating class called him the Iron Nelson.”

“Like the Iron Maiden?”

“Or the Iron Lady,” says Matt. “Or both.”

Karen smiles, and it’s the first real, bright smile that Darcy’s seen on her in days. “What’d they call you, the Rack? The Wheel?”

“I didn’t really get a name,” Matt says. “I don’t think.”

“You totally had a name,” says Foggy. “You were Silvertongue.”

Darcy stares hard at her bag in an attempt to keep herself from blushing, because she is _not_ thinking about blankets or tongues or fingers up her skirt, she definitely isn’t, nope. Matt hooks his pinkie around hers just for a second, and he _knows,_ the jackass. He knows and yeah, maybe the pair of them had made very bad decisions during the Sex Debacle post-Yakatomi weirdness, but now that they’ve steadied out completely her brain is back in the gutter and _I’m killing you dead, later, sir. Very dead. The most dead. Stop smirking._

“What was Darcy?” Karen either hasn’t noticed any of this, or isn’t acknowledging it. Foggy definitely hasn’t noticed; if he had, he would have started snickering. Or made the _guys, really, seriously, this is a thing that’s happening right now?_ face. “Can I guess?”

“Oh, God, don’t—”

“Terrier,” says Karen.

“Nope.” Foggy looks pleased, though. “Try again.”

“Honey badger?”

“Again, no, but I congratulate you on your memedom.”

“Damn,” says Karen, and Darcy hides her head in her hands. “Teddy Roosevelt?”

“Don’t you dare bring him into this,” Darcy says. “Teddy is very near and dear to my heart.”

“Fine.” Karen shrugs. “What did they call Darcy?”

“ _Wolverine_ ,” says Foggy, with a certain amount of relish. Karen blinks.

“Wait, isn’t that the guy—”

“ _Don’t_ ,” Darcy says again, and Matt’s hand on the small of her back makes her skin go prickling warm. “Seriously, don’t.”

“Not saying anything,” Karen says, and holds up her hands. “Not a word.”

“She started so young,” says Foggy, in a wistful voice, and yelps when Darcy steps on his foot. “Watch it.”

“You said you weren’t going to bring that up ever again.”

“You brought up the Iron Nelson.”

“Can we agree to disagree?” says Matt. He’s stroking his thumb back and forth over the fabric of her jacket, which is deeply unhelpful. “Whatever you call it, Foggy, it’s great.”

“Yeah, well, this isn’t Iron Nelson stuff, Matt, this is like—about to piss my pants terror stuff.”    

“All I was _going_ to say—” Darcy bumps back into Matt’s hand, sorts through her bag for her buzzing phone “—was for the guy who doesn’t want too much to do with this, you’re doing fucking awesome. But now that you brought up the nickname—”

“Nah, you can still compliment me, that’s totally fine.”

“Screw you.” Darcy shuts her mouth until another clerk of court wanders by (Truesmith glares daggers at her from the opposite end of the hallway; _still so fucking bitter about Ty Johnson, jackass_ ) and then says, “Speaking of frankness—”

“Har-de-har.”

“Karen and I should scoot. Jen’s going to be at Carvel’s in like five minutes—” she waggles her phone “—and if we’re not there then she’ll probably have our heads.” She knocks a fist to Foggy’s elbow. “And you guys are—”

“Back to work.” Matt dips his head, puts his lips to the spot right in front of her ear, and Darcy pinches her nails hard into the palm of her hand at the warmth of it. “Good?”

“Good.” She flexes her fingers out of Foggy’s line of sight, fighting the urge to reach out and touch, and Matt’s smirk gets even more ridiculous. _I am going to kill you with a rebar._ “Bye, boys. There better not be a _No Girls Allowed_ sign in the door when we get back.”

“Get rid of slimy girls,” says Foggy. “G.R.O.S.S. The S in girls is capitalized for acronymic purposes.”

“If you Calvin me I will Hobbes you.”

“Take her away, Susie,” says Foggy. “I can’t stand the sight of her stripy face.”

“Yeah, sure, Mr. Bun.”

Karen’s still giggling as she loops her arm through Darcy’s. “So if you had to pick between _Wolverine_ and _Honey Badger—_ ”

“I am a delicate fucking flower, Page, don’t even start with me.” Darcy blinks at her. “Page, Castle—and there’s a Knight at the 15th now, we can just make _Camelot_ jokes all day with that—”

Karen jabs her nails hard into the soft skin of Darcy’s elbow. “Try it.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” She flutters her lashes. “Keep calling me Wolverine, see what happens.”

“So like—” A clerk of court knocks right into Karen’s shoulder, scoots away without apologizing. “If you’re Wolverine, and Matt’s Silvertongue, and Foggy’s the Iron Nelson—”

“Or the Iron Maiden.”

“Or the Iron Maiden.” She checks her watch. “What the hell did people call you all together? The Three Musketeers? The Deathly Hallows?”

“The Deathly Hallows would have been a good one, but no.” Darcy muses. “I mean, I didn’t hear all of them, but I think some people called us the Golden Trio. Like, Harry, Ron, and Hermione. Foggy did that, a lot. We were Danny, Tucker, and Sam from _Danny Phantom_ too, especially when I was streaking my hair. I figured at one point that someone would throw Luke, Leia, and Han at us, but that one never happened. Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup for a while.”

Karen chokes on her coffee. “Who came up with these?”

“Marci mostly.”

“The Mother of Dragons?”

“She’s a freak for cartoons.” Darcy hooks her hair back up out of her face. “I’m pretty sure her favorite was Spongebob, Patrick, and Squidward—”

“Wait, were you Patrick or Spongebob?”

“Are you joking? Matt was Patrick. I was Squidward. Foggy was the sponge of sunlight because he’s always been Marci’s favorite, for obvious and also completely inexplicable reasons considering half the time she acts like she’s about to slit your throat with her eyeballs.”

She’s giggling and trying really hard to hide it, but Karen can’t actually hide laughter very well. She has a poker face for a hell of a lot of things, Karen Page, but not laughter. It creeps out like flowers in brick. “Matt was _Patrick_?”

“Spongebear, Patmatt, and Squidwis, ready for duty. She still calls me Squid sometimes.” Darcy loops an arm around Karen’s waist, knocks her head to her shoulder. “And she’d probably smack Sandy on you pretty fast if she thought about it.”

“I’m a squirrel in a diver’s suit?”

Darcy shrugs. “If you wanna be. We could share Squidward if you want.”

“Good with me.” Karen peeks at her through her lashes. “You—”

She stops.

“What?”

“Nothing, just—” She settles her hand on Darcy’s waist, very carefully, like she’s scared she’s going to break something. “I’m glad you’re doing better, that’s all.”

“I mean.” She’d explained, finally, first to Foggy (who’d actually physically shaken her to hide how teary he’d become and then dragged her out to Josie’s in a fit of _fuck everything, we need this_ ) and then to Karen (who’d gone all thin-lipped and wrapped her in a hug that, judging by the current circumstance, still hasn’t actually ended completely), but…yeah. It’d been an interesting week. “Talking, y’know. It helps.”

Karen’s mouth gets tight for a moment. Her eyes shadow. “I’m—”

“Karen, honey, I’m okay.” Darcy knocks her head to Karen’s shoulder, awkward as it is to do that and keep walking. “And you didn’t do anything wrong, it was me being stupid. All right? You don’t have to apologize. I’m all right.”

They’ve stopped on the street corner and hit the crosswalk light before Karen clears her throat. “Okay.”

“I dunno about calling you Sandy,” says Darcy, “Sandy’s a bit too optimistic for you—”

“Hah.”

“—but we can always switch you and Foggy out and have you be Bubbles. Chipper with a dark side.”

“Who would Foggy be, then?”

Darcy pops a shoulder. “He can be Dad.”

“ _Darcy._ ”

“Also, I will pay you like thirty bucks if you call Matt _Blossom_ someday soon. It makes him all fussy and it’s wonderful.”

There’s the snickering again, crackling like tinfoil. “He can _hear you_.”

“Whatever, man.” She considers. “Just think of all the luxurious hair he’d have as Blossom.”

Karen winds up snorting all the way across the road to Carvel’s, and to be entirely honest, Darcy would be completely okay with being called Wolverine exclusively if it meant Karen lost the bags under her eyes. They keep getting worse, even under the makeup.

Jen’s only just sat down in her usual booth at Carvel’s when they wander in the door. She looks—actually, she looks a lot better. She looks a _lot_ better, Darcy thinks. Jen’s worn suits for as long as Darcy can remember, and not seeing her in them out in the world is kind of strange, but she’s rocking the T-shirt and jeans thing like whoa. Jen waves at them (like they’re actually not going to notice her in the booth) and when Darcy slides in on Jen’s side, Jen knocks her elbow right into a bruise on Darcy’s ribs. “How was Batzer?”

“Batting home runs as usual.” It’s a good thing Batzer is a baseball nut, that’s all Darcy has to say. The number of baseball jokes that get dragged out about her in courthouse chitchat would have been utterly excruciating otherwise. ( _See: me,_ Pride and Prejudice, _and snarky lawyers thinking they’re so damn funny._ Snarky lawyers, snarky Elektras, snarky _anyone_. _I wasn’t named after Fitzwilliam, dammit, it was a constitutive equation describing the flow of fluid through a porous medium, thanks very much._ Her babushka had thought it would be funny, apparently, and her mother had just kind of thrown her hands in the air in a typical Lorna Lewis move.) “She has about as much patience for Reyes’s bullshit as we do, but she’s also not taking sides, so it’s very equitable snark. What are you and Angie plotting?”

“Stop trying to get me to tell you, I d-don’t want to jinx it.” Jen nods. “Karen. Rey’s still at home. I took her out on a circle around the neighborhood b-before I left, just in case, though.”

“Cool.” Karen’s fading back into Hunting Dog mode fairly quickly, but she’s at least still smiling a little. “Thanks. I didn’t think jury selection would be going on this long today.”

“I d-don’t mind. I like dogs.”

“No,” says Darcy, automatically. “No dogs. They eat shoes.”

“You don’t live with me anymore, young lady. You get no say in whether or not I get a dog.”

“Fine, if you wanna complain to someone about how it eats your shoes, you don’t get to come to me.”

“Watch those sour grapes.” Jen nudges her in the bruise again. Darcy can’t really bring herself to care. “The primary concern was D-Darla, and with her sudden personality switch—”

Karen very deliberately does not look at Darcy.

“—she’s doing well enough with Rey.” Jen adds more sugar to her coffee, leaves the wrapper on the edge of the tabletop. “If she keeps on acting like this then maybe after K-Karen moves out I can adopt a dog.”

Darcy blinks. “You’re moving out of the apartment?”

“Maybe.” Karen stares hard at the table. “I can’t afford it right now, especially considering—” She stops. “I just—I don’t know. I haven’t decided. I don’t want to be a burden.”

“I d-don’t mind you staying as long as you want,” says Jen, with the air of someone who’s had this conversation before. “The city’s a mess. Housing prices go up or down depending on the hour, let alone the week.”

“Still.”

This, Darcy thinks, is a conversation she can’t exactly have a say in. She hunches down over her glass of water, and fights the urge to ask for a straw.

“I c-can manage the apartment,” Jen says. “For the next three months at least. I’ve c-calculated it, and it isn’t a question.”

“I just don’t want to be a problem while you’re looking for a new job, that’s all.”

“You’re not.” Jen looks at Darcy. “D-Don’t shrink into the tabletop, Darcy.”

“Trying hard not to hear things.”

“It’s okay if you do,” Karen says. “I don’t care. Like I said, I’m just—I haven’t decided. I thought about it maybe twice. Jen’s picking at it.”

Jen shrugs.

“Still.” Darcy picks at her cuticles under the table. “I dunno.”

“It’s b-beside the point, anyway.”

Millicent wanders in like a wraith, here and then gone, whisking orders away with her and leaving coffee as a peace offering.

“So,” Darcy says. “Uh. You were the one who said you wanted to meet up, Jen. What’s up?”

Jen hums into her coffee mug. “Right. Two things. The first one is s-something that Karen came up with last night, but I w-wanted to look into it this morning to make sure it was feasible before she told you. Just in case it turned out to be bogus. So that’s her ball.”

Darcy cocks an eyebrow. “What’s under your hat, Kare?”

“I don’t wear hats unless I’m going to get frostbite, Darcy, you know that. They make me look like a Kewpie doll.” Karen waits until Millicent’s wandered away from their table again, and fumbles her bag up onto her lap. “I was going over the coroner’s report again last night—”

“Delicious bedtime imagery, I’m sure.”

“Sure.” Karen kicks her ankle. “Anyway, I was looking at it, and it struck me, y’know, that there might be a way we can get the coroner himself to meet with us to go over the details.”

“I thought you said his secretary said he’s out for the rest of the month.”

“He’s been in and out,” says Karen. “Usually when I call, he’s out. And when he _is_ at the office, he’s unable to meet with us, for _reasons_ —”

“We figured that would happen, though.”

“Yeah, but it’s still phenomenally irritating.” Karen knocks her in the ankle again. Darcy knocks her back. “Anyway, I was looking at it all last night, and I figured that if he wasn’t taking _my_ calls, or the firm’s calls, then he might take someone else’s. Especially if they came through a more private channel than his work phone.”

“She stalked him,” says Jen mildly. “Found him on Facebook and everything. It was fairly entertaining.” 

“At least he _has_ a Facebook,” says Karen. “You’re still catching up to the twenty-first century.”

“It seemed illogical t-to make a Facebook page as a part of the District Attorney’s Office. It would have made me t-too easy to find.”

“Guys,” Darcy says.

“I had the thought—Jen and Tepper have worked together before.” Karen strikes a little pose. “He won’t meet with _us_ , but he’s already okayed a meeting with Jen. He’s supposed to meet her in twenty minutes for lunch today, and I thought that, y’know, we could ambush him when he shows up.”

 _…well then._ “I mean, the likelihood he’s going to come right out and say _yeah, I doctored the autopsy_ is so, so low, Karen, especially if Reyes is leaning on him—we have no idea what she’s even holding over his head, and considering what you said happened to that guy who helped Frank get out of Metro-General the first time—”

“Please d-don’t say the first time,” says Jen. “It makes it sound like it’s happened more than once.”

“Over my desiccated corpse is he escaping the hospital again,” says Darcy flatly. “I will beat his head in myself and drag him to court if I have to.”

“He wanted this trial, and—” Karen drops her voice “—Brannigan’s dead, anyway. It’s not like he’s going to go anywhere right now.”

“I’m just not sure that our meeting with Tepper will do anything other than get people whispering that we’re harassing the prosecution’s expert witness.”

“Yeah, but that’s the thing, everyone in the DA’s office has been paying extra attention to this case because Jen resigned.” Karen darts a look at Jen, and then focuses on Darcy again. “I mean, Darcy, you—you know how well-regarded Jen was. And she _left_. She—she resigned in front of witnesses and called out Reyes on her bullshit—”

“Which is still one of the best things I’ve ever seen in my entire life,” says Darcy, and Jen bows, twirling her fingers like a circus ringmaster.

“She left, and people are whispering. I mean, you’re the one who said that Angie was talking about other people thinking about following Jen’s lead. It—I don’t know. It might be enough to push Tepper into talking. It’s not a lot, but it’s possible. And at least if we can get him talking we could—I mean, Reyes is more than likely going to call him in to testify, and if we can get him on our side, or at least to—to consider it—”

“We can show that Reyes has her hand around his throat.” She chews on the inside of her cheek. “I mean, yeah, there’s a chance, but ethically it’s pretty murky, and if it gets out then Reyes will actually have our asses on sticks.”

“No, I know.” _But you have that Hunting Dog look, Kare, you really do._ “But this—even if Reyes does find out, all it does is say to the jury that there’s a _reason_ we were looking into Tepper. And a reason that Reyes is scrambling to make us look bad for doing it, when honestly it’s kind of an elementary question, y’know, _why were the results changed_. _And_ it might give us more background for—for how Frank’s family died, that day, what happened to them, what happened in Central Park, all of it. Which is—is kind of the most important part.”

And it’s certainly not like they’re going to make Reyes’s opinion of them any worse, considering Samantha Reyes probably wants to douse the whole firm in gasoline and set it on fire just for _looking_ in Castle’s direction. Spider-Man’s spike in activity around Brooklyn (which, thanks, Spider-Bro) on top of the discovery of Finn Brannigan’s body in the middle of the street at 44th and 8th (and yeah, Vanessa had just…had it dumped. In the street. To be hit by cars. It was _super classy_ and apparently made Reyes drop her coffee mug in the middle of the District Attorney’s office.) has probably made no improvement on her mood. Still. “He really agreed to meet with you, Jen?”

“Tepper’s not a bad g-guy,” Jen says. “I wouldn’t have thought he’d ever be the k-kind of man to falsify official records like this. If he has, and it’s not one of his assistants, then whatever Samantha has on him is—is powerful.”

She falls quiet. Darcy reaches across the table, and catches at Jen’s hand, squeezing. Jen squeezes back, and forces a smile that fools no one.

“He know we’re coming?”

“Hell no,” says Karen. “He’d bolt. He’s been actively avoiding my calls for weeks, there’s no _way_ he’d show if he knew that we were going to be there too.”

“And the reason why he doesn’t suspect that we’re going to double-team him when Jen’s my sister is…?”

“The thing about having a r-reputation for playing by the rules is that people d-don’t expect you to break them.” Jen shrugs, and draws her hand out of Darcy’s again as Millicent comes back with their food. “It’s also why I said he should come here. Carvel’s is s-safe territory, it’s by the courthouse, he w-won’t expect anything here. The pair of you should sit somewhere else. I’ll speak to him, see if I can g-get him to agree to talk to you, or at least listen to what you have to say.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“Then we hope to God he doesn’t mention the ambush to Reyes and trap the son of a bitch on the stand,” says Karen. “Either way we have someone by the balls.”

“Rawr,” says Darcy, and Karen bounces her eyebrows. “Jen, if you put any more mustard on that sandwich it’s going to muster up a regiment and lay waste to the Lettuce Fields.”

“Shut your mouth,” says Jen, and squirts the bottle one last time. “I don’t have to g-go into court with nice breath, I can put as much mustard and pickle and onion on my food as I like, and considering _I_ never comment on how much vinegar you put on your French fries—”

“Bullshit,” Darcy says, but she’s smiling. “Whatever, Jenny.”

Jen waggles her fingers again. “So is th-this how it usually works?”

“Is this how what usually works?”

“This,” Jen says. “Is this how it usually works?”

Darcy and Karen look at each other for a moment. Karen’s the one who says, “Yeah, I mean—yeah. Usually there are more of us meeting up, but…yes.”

“Hmm.” Jen adds salt to her French fries. “Interesting.”

“What’s that voice for?”

“Nothing,” says Jen. “Just—thinking. Am I not allowed to c-come to these meetings?”

“I mean, like—” Darcy bites her lip. “There’s—there are degrees of involvement, Jen, I don’t want, y’know. I don’t want to make things harder for you than they need to be. The more you know the deeper it gets and the deeper it gets the more in trouble you are and—”

“I’m going to pretend I d-didn’t hear any of that,” says Jen, “because that would be a p-personal insult.”

“Jenny—”

“What was the other thing?” says Karen.

Jen blinks. “Hm?”

“You said two things.” When Darcy opens her mouth, Karen kicks her under the table. “Tepper’s the first thing. What’s the second thing?”

“Oh,” says Jen, and finally puts the mustard back down. _Goddamn, it’s like…it’s like a field of sunflower petals with onion smileys._ At least the smell is giving her an excuse as to why her eyes are watering. _Christ, Page. Pointy, pointy shoes._ “No. I wanted your opinion on something. It can wait.”

“Jen—”

“Seriously, it c-can wait.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely.” This smile, at least, isn’t fake. “Go hide somewhere. He’ll be here soon.”

Gregory Tepper is in his late forties, early fifties, salt and pepper hair and glasses and smile lines around his eyes and lips. Right now, though, he’s darting, his eyes flicking back and forth around the café, hand curled tight around the strap to his briefcase. He keeps spinning his wedding ring on his finger, back and forth. Tells everywhere, Darcy thinks, and turns back to her coffee so he doesn’t see her staring. Nervous as hell and she’s not close enough to hear why. Opposite her, Karen stirs more cream into her coffee. “What’s he doing?”

“He’s about as twitchy as a tweaker.” Or as twitchy as Grotto. _Please, don’t be carrying a gun. I don’t want to break your elbow._ “Seriously, Kare, this could blow up in our faces like…holy shit. If we get caught meeting with an expert witness—”

“He hasn’t been called yet.”

“That’s kind of a fine line.”

“Do you not what to find out what happened?”

Darcy looks up from her coffee. Karen’s mouth has gone thin as a razor. Slowly, she settles her mug back on the table. “You’re seriously asking me that?”

Karen bites her tongue. She rubs at her eyes. “Shit, I didn’t—I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. I know you want to find out, I just—”

 _Just what?_ Just reacted? Darcy turns her mug between her palms. “We’re all kind of reactionary right now. I just don’t want this to come back and bite us in the ass in court, is all. We’re barely clinging on as it is, and if Reyes manages to throw us under the bus like she wants, then we’re fucked.”

“I know.”

“The financials are—”

“Tipping on disaster.” Karen wipes her face. “If we don’t win the MSM suit and get the funds from the court, then—I don’t know. We’ll have to close the doors until we can afford to reopen. If we ever can.”

Her stomach hurts. “There’s still no word from them if they’re going to fight it. I think they’re hoping I’ll go away if they ignore me long enough.”

Karen’s razor smile goes softer. “Yeah, well. Clearly they’re idiots.”

“It’s an expensive private conservatory that’s predominantly white and upper-class. They’re used to people going away if they ignore them long enough. Or burying them in bureaucracy until they give up. I’m good at bureaucratic bullshit and I don’t like being ignored, they just…haven’t figured that out yet.” Darcy peeks at Jen and Tepper. Tepper’s still sitting, thankfully, just kind of staring wide-eyed at Jen as Jen talks. She’s leaning forward over the table, touching the back of his hand without breaking his gaze, when Darcy looks away. “Karen, honey, when did you last sleep?”

“When did you?”

Darcy cocks an eyebrow. “Do you not recall the enforced bedrest of the past few days?”

Her mouth quirks. “Habit. Sorry. Um…last night, for a few hours.”

“And before that?”

Karen shrugs. “I don’t always look at the clock when I go to sleep, lately. I’m thinking too much. It kind of doesn’t register anymore.” She considers. “I fell asleep at the hospital yesterday for an hour, I think. Frank woke me up after a while.”

Darcy hums, and goes back to her coffee. “What did Frank say about character witnesses?”

“He gave me a few names. I’m working on running some of them down.” Karen bites her lip. “I know Foggy wants to run with M’Naghten and the insanity plea but—”

“You don’t have to argue this one with me, babe, I know.” Darcy shrugs. “And Matt’s right, it barely ever works, but if Frank’s shot down PTSD—”

“He swears this isn’t PTSD.”

“I mean, it still could be, just not from war. You can get PTSD from seeing your family murdered just as easily as you can get it in Afghanistan or Iraq or any of the countries he went to on classified missions.” She bobs her head. “He sees it. In awful detail, every time he closes his eyes. You said so yourself. I don’t think there’s a human being on the planet that could see his family murdered the way Frank did and not come out of it with post-traumatic stress, no matter what kind of training he had in the Marines.”

Karen starts to chew on her thumbnail again. Darcy reaches across the table, catches her wrist. She blinks at her hand, at the tatters of her cuticle. “Thanks.”

“We still have some time before the rest of the jury is selected. If we can’t convince him of the PTSD defense by then, then we can at least start looking at other options. I know Foggy wanted to get a specialist to look at the X-rays of the bullet wound from when Frank was shot, maybe something will come from that. You can’t exactly get shot in the head and come out of it unscathed.”   

“Yeah.” Karen presses her hand flat to the tabletop. “What are they doing?”

“Still talking.” Tepper’s shaking his head, but he’s still plastered to his seat. “How many kids does he have?”

“He and his husband adopted twin girls last April,” says Karen. “They were foster parents for a while.”

“Lots of people for Reyes to hurt.”

“Yeah,” says Karen, slowly. Darcy thieves another little thing of creamer out of the dispenser.

“What?”

“I just don’t understand.” Karen shakes her head. “I was talking to Jen a little about this, but I don’t get it. How do you fall that far?”

“Tepper?”

“No, Reyes,” says Karen. “Jen respected her, she _liked_ her, how do you go from someone like the woman Jen used to look up to to—to whatever Reyes is now? How does that happen?”

“Absolute power corrupts absolutely, I guess.” Darcy tips her head. “Some people are just bad. We know that.”

“Yeah, maybe.” Karen wipes at her eyes again. “I just—don’t want to get blindsided with bullshit again.”

“Like Grotto.”

“And Frank.”

“And Elektra,” Darcy mutters under her breath, and Karen lifts her eyebrows.

“Has something happened with the Wicked Witch?”

( _It was about as far away as I could get._ )

“I’m holding off judgment, is all.” Darcy bites the inside of her cheek, winces when she finds a cut. _Fuck, ow. Blood. Gross._ “If you think it’ll help we can always look deeper into Reyes.”

“Ben thinks it’s a dead end, he’s had a file on her since she became the District Attorney and on all sides she’s just…y’know, she’s had power for too long, she doesn’t want to lose it. And I do think that’s a part of it, it just—feels really weird. And one-sided. I mean, she hates people with abilities so much, that doesn’t seem to just be fear or whatever else people hate vigilantes for.”

“Does she hate abilities or masks?”

“I mean, one comes with the other a lot of the time.”

Darcy cocks an eyebrow.

“I said a _lot_ of the time, not _all_ the time.” Karen rolls her eyes. “There’s definitely at least a little bit of bias there that can be proven. Everything that happened with Jess—”

“If we drag Jess in she could get arrested for what happened with Kilgrave.”

“There was no proof of any of that.”

“She brought a decapitated head into the 15th Precinct. I promise you a lot of the cops still remember that much.”

“I still think we should look into it,” Karen says, and her jaw’s set, and her eyes are sparking, and _welp, okay. Juggernaut on the move._ “If we can find something with Reyes, maybe—I don’t know. I want to know _why_.”

Darcy gnaws at her lip. “You think you can look into it without too much trouble?”

“I can try. Santino can help me, he’s a much better hacker than I am. Plus there are all the files Ben has that I can start with, and the backlog of newspapers at the _Bulletin,_ I’m pretty sure I can bully Ellison into letting me see those.”

“I’m thinking more like you working yourself into a coma or getting arrested or sent to the ER kinda trouble here, Kare.”

“Oh,” says Karen. She blinks a few times, like it hadn’t occurred to her. “I have the .380. And I remember most of the throws you guys have drilled me in, so that’s…okay, I think.”

 _Oy._ “I just don’t want to get a call that you’ve been put into the hospital. Or arrested.”

“Considering your history with that shit you don’t have much room to talk there.”

“I have _never_ been arrested,” says Darcy, and wrinkles her nose. “That’s unfair and uncalled for. The police like me. I’m likeable. I have cop friends.”

“You have one cop friend. The other is an ex who happens to be a cop and for some reason you still speak to.”

“Are you saying exes can’t be friends?”

“I don’t know what the hell you and Brett are, Darcy, but I doubt he’d call you a friend.”

Darcy shrugs. “Cohorts in shenanigans, then.”

“I’m pretty sure he’d think that was worse.”

“And I’m pretty sure Foggy has a crush on him, so there’s that.”

Karen blinks again, in a completely different way this time. “Really?”

“Mm,” says Darcy, and pours more sugar into her coffee.

“I thought you were just teasing about that.”

“I mean, I was, but I’m also pretty sure it’s an actual thing. Foggy doesn’t tease like that unless he really likes someone.”

Karen doesn’t frown, exactly, but her lips curve down. “Oh.”

“Everything okay?”

“I mean—yeah, no, that’s fine, I just—I’m wondering how that would work. Considering everything.”

“It’d be as complicated as everything else. Still not that bad in comparison.” At Jen’s table, Tepper shakes his head. His eyes dart to Karen and Darcy, and widen. Then he nods. Darcy collects her mug again, and heaves her bag over her shoulder. “And that’s our cue. You ready for this?”

“If I say yes,” Karen says, “will I come off as overeager and reckless?”

“You already do, honey.”

“Still yes.”

“That’s my girl,” says Darcy, and Karen knocks her in the side with one elbow.

.

.

.

Tepper doesn’t actually give them much of anything. He never answers any of their questions directly, neither _yes_ nor _no_ ; sometimes he’ll flick a look at Jen, and sometimes he’ll twitch, but for the most part he just listens. “If you tell the truth,” Karen says, “we can protect you, Dr. Tepper. We know people who can keep you safe.”

“Not from them.”

“We managed it with Fisk.”

Tepper’s eyes flick to Darcy, to the scar on the back of her hand. “Not very well.”

“Look.” Karen folds her hands up into knots on her knees. “Reyes is willing to kill to keep this a secret. None of us are blind to that. The question right now is if you’re willing to let her keep whatever secrets she has, and let the deaths of Maria, Lisa, and Frank Castle Jr. go unpunished, or if you’re willing to do the right thing.”

“I’ll lose my job,” Tepper says, in a tight voice. “I’ll lose my job. I’ll be arrested. My girls will grow up without one of their fathers. I could die, my _family_ could die—”

“Like we said. If you decide to tell the truth, we can protect you. And if it comes out that the District Attorney herself has been accused of corruption and murder, I really doubt the DA’s office is going to press charges on one of the whistleblowers. Especially considering you’re one of her victims.”

Tepper wavers.

“Greg,” says Jen, in a quiet voice. “We c-can help you. If you let us.” 

His eyes jump from Karen, to Jen, to Darcy and Darcy’s hand. Back to Karen. When he heaves his bag over his shoulder, stands, his fingers are shaking. “I need to think,” he says. “I need—I need to think.”

“If you change your mind,” Jen says, “c-call me at that number I gave you. It’s a burner phone. If they’re watching you, you can just say you were speaking to your cousin. Your family won’t be put into danger.”

Tepper wavers in place. Then he leaves, slamming out the door of Carvel’s without a goodbye. Karen sinks back down into her chair, looking pleased.

“Now we wait,” she says, and orders an ice cream sundae.

It’s another hour before they split up again, Jen back to the apartment to make sure Rey’s not wrecked anything, Darcy and Karen aiming right for the firm. There’s no G.R.O.S.S. sign, thankfully (Darcy’s not entirely sure what she would have done if there were, other than take a photo and post it to Twitter) but Foggy has a look on his face like an angry hamster, and there’s a smell in here like burned coffee. Matt’s nowhere to be seen. The closed door to their office speaks volumes.

“You have a visitor,” he says, not to Karen but to Darcy.

“Shit, it isn’t Elektra, is it?”

“Nope.” Foggy darts a look at the interior window, and when Darcy follows his gaze— _oh, fuck._ Dark hair, dark leather bomber, boots on the table. Jessica goddamn Jones is staring through the glass right at her, and there’s murder on her mouth. “I tried to talk to her, but she wouldn’t say anything to me.”

“What about Matt?”

“Matt’s hiding.”

The door opens. “I’m not hiding,” Matt says, his mouth screwing up. “She didn’t want to talk to me, either. She wants to talk to you.”

And Darcy can’t remember if she called Jess or not. _Shit, I think I didn’t._ Fuck everything. Fuck her with a frying pan. “ _Shit._ You couldn’t have texted me?”

“She showed up like five minutes ago.”

And apparently was scary enough to send Matt into hiding and give Foggy a hernia. “Why is it always me?” Darcy says, and dumps her purse on Karen’s desk. “Why is it _always_ me?”

“You’re the one who keeps adopting people who could tear your head off with their bare hands,” Foggy says. “If they come in looking for a fight, they’re your problem.”

“I can go in with you if you want,” Karen says, but she says it so dubiously that Darcy’s already shaking her head.

“No, I will. Just—if she comes at me over the table, someone call Trish.” She eyes Matt. “Are you coming?”

“She told him she’d shove his head up his ass if he tried to come in,” Foggy says, and Matt’s mouth twists again. “While he’s in the Tres Horny Boys helmet.”

 _Jessica Jones listens to The Adventure Zone?_ “If she’s already threatened you it’ll probably just make things worse.” She heaves a sigh. “Here’s hoping nothing goes wrong.”

“We love you, don’t die,” says Foggy, and Karen vanishes into the kitchen to hide.

Darcy’s barely opened the door when Jess slams her boots back to the floor. “You motherfucker,” says Jess. “You _motherfucker._ ”

“Hi, Jessica,” says Darcy. “Lovely to see you. You want coffee?”

“Don’t change the subject.”

Darcy pulls the door of the conference room shut, and folds her hands at the small of her back, squeezing the doorknob hard enough to hurt. “Would that subject be how much of a motherfucker I am?”

“Absolutely,” says Jess. “You’re a complete fucktrumpet.” 

Through the window, Foggy cocks an eyebrow at her. Darcy yanks the shades closed, one after the other. “Seriously, what did I do?”

Jess kicks the chair aside—thankfully with regular strength, not Jesstastic strength, which means they don’t have to buy a new rolling chair anytime soon—and shoves her hands into her pockets. “Let’s recap,” she says, “which I’m shit at a lot of the time—booze kind of fucks with short-term memory sometimes, y’know, but the past few weeks have actually been pretty memorable.” She lifts her index finger. “Some jackass starts tearing the Kitchen apart with guns and fucking—bombs and explosives and shit. He’s caught within three days, but I get no damn word that you haven’t had your head blown off in the process. I have to call and check. I _hate_ calling people.”

“But Malcolm—”

“Shut up, sufferpuppet,” says Jess, and Darcy shuts up. Up goes the middle finger. “Next thing I know I get a call from Cassie Cain asking me to hang around uptown and watch a member of the yakuza get fucking manicures, with no solid explanation, cheers for that—”

“Jess—”

“And _then_ ,” Jess says, in an even louder voice, which, holy shit, since when does Jess yell like this, “I hear there are people aiming to blow your pansyass firm off the fucking map—”

“Wait _—_ ”

“—both literally _and_ figuratively judging by how your jackass boyfriend called me in as backup last week—”

“Jessica—” 

“—but if you think I haven’t noticed Reyes circling the wagons then you’re fucking dreaming, I get half my cases from _Jeri Hogarth,_ I have to keep an eye on _The Devil Wears Prada_ —”

“Jesus Christ—”

Now the pinkie finger, and there are bruises on Jess’s knuckles again, dark as soot. “And I figured I’d at least get some kind of explanation after that but _nope_ , not a single fucking word—”

“Jess, back up—”

And finally the thumb, so her whole hand is splayed. “And your secretary has pulled a gun on my secretary and I have been as patient as I fucking can but you are talking, with my boot up your ass or without, but it’s happening _now_ , or I will rip your fucking hair out of your head and throw you off a fucking skyscraper!”

Jess is panting, the torn fabric of her jeans flashing scabby knees and a cut on her right thigh that’s probably less than a day old. It looks ragged, like she’d caught her leg on a fire escape. There’s blood crusted on the fabric of her pants. Darcy wipes her hands over her face. “Did you get a tetanus shot for that?”

“Fuck you.”

“I’ll take that as a no.” Outside the conference room, the firm is being terrifyingly silent. Darcy can just picture their faces, Karen in the kitchen with a hand over her mouth, Foggy’s lips puckered in a silent whistle, Matt doing the lift-the-eyebrows, blow-the-cheeks thing that means _Christ, I’m really glad I’m not you right now._ All her friends suck. “I didn’t know about the gun thing. But the rest of it, yeah, uh—Sorry. I’m sorry. It’s—been kind of insane.”

Jessica somehow puffs up even bigger, all pissed-off chicken. “Like that’s ever fucking stopped you from talking my ear off before.”

“I know.”

“I had to hear you had the shit kicked out of you from _Trish_.”

“I know.”

“Like I give a shit about the fights you have with your boyfriend,” Jess says, “that you can keep to yourself, I think he’s a fucking prick—”

“Watch it, Jessica.”

“—but the fucking _Punisher,_ Lewis, Jesus Christ. You could’ve called.”

“You’d have ignored me.”

“No, I fucking wouldn’t have,” Jess says, very hard and cold, and turns her face away. “With something like the Punisher? I would’ve picked up the goddamn phone.”

Shit. Darcy blinks, furiously. “Sorry, Jess. I’m—I should have. I’m sorry.”

Jess buzzes like a bumblebee, glaring at her. “You’re a goddamn _fucktrumpet._ ”

“Yeah.” She looks hard at the ceiling, and then opens the door. “Hey, guys? I’m gonna go to the hospital.”

“Why?” Karen pokes her head back out of the kitchen. Her cheeks are a little pink, and she won’t look at Jess. “Something wrong?”

“I just want to make sure Jessica doesn’t get lockjaw,” says Darcy, and hooks her arm through Jess’s before she can snap. She’s all stiff and shivery, and she almost wrenches out of Darcy’s grip in the millisecond before she settles again. _Shit, I always forget how mercurial she is with touch._ Usually Jess is okay, but sometimes, when she’s pissed—shit. Oops. “We can talk on the way, all right?”

“Don’t fucking point a gun at Malcolm,” says Jess, and glares at Karen. “I don’t care what the fuck is wrong with your head, I will beat the living shit out of you if you try it again.”

“It was an accident.” Karen puts her shoulders back. “I was upset, he scared me. It won’t happen again.”

“Better not,” Jess says, and yanks Darcy out the door.

The walk from the firm to Metro-General isn’t all that long, maybe half an hour, but it still feels longer. It’s kind of miraculous that Jess hasn’t looked into most of this on her own (“Trish,” Jess grunts when Darcy asks, and turns her head away) but there’s more to explain than she thinks there will be, and they wind up taking the long way around and stopping in a bodega so Jess can buy a pack of cigarettes. She doesn’t smoke them, just taps one rhythmically against the package as Darcy goes over the broad strokes of it, a few of the finer details. She’s not entirely sure Jess will want to hear all the emotional chicanery, so she leaves that out, for the most part, but she can’t leave out everything, especially when it comes to Karen and Frank Castle. When she finishes, they’re a block out from the hospital, and Jess takes one long look at her before dropping down to sit on the curb and press the heels of her hands into her eyes.

“ _Fucktrumpet,_ ” Jess says again. “An actual fucking fucktrumpet.”

“Speaking.” Darcy smooths the back of her skirt down, settles next to Jess on the sidewalk. “You gonna smoke that?”

“ _You_ gonna smoke it?”

“No.” Not that she thinks Matt would necessarily turn his nose up at kissing her _entirely_ if she did, but she also doesn’t want the list of chemicals and poisons in the damn things reeled off at her the way he does with pesticides on non-organic apples. It’s the most irritating thing on the planet. _What if I just want a damn apple, Matthew? What if I’m willing to poison myself for the granny smith goodness?_ “Just wondering why you bought them if you’re not going to light them. This isn’t some kind of Augustus Waters-style _I put the killing thing in my mouth and do not give it the power to it kill me_ shit, is it?”

“Who’s Augustus Waters?”

“Never mind. If you escaped John Green, I will not drag you in.” She tugs at the hem of her skirt, and shifts her feet until her ankles aren’t screaming for torqueing them in high heels. “Sorry for not telling you sooner.”

Jessica crushes a shard of broken glass under the heavy heel of her boot. “Lightning Bug and the Black Hole know?”

“Tandy and Ty are out practicing control somewhere and I’m _not_ pulling them into this. They’re barely eighteen; they don’t need the Punisher and the yakuza and Fisk on their plates. Especially not all at once.”

“Nightwing’s working on it. And Bug-Boy.”

“Bug-Boy’s been independent for a while. And Nightwing wasn’t experimented on by Vanessa Manfredi’s dad,” says Darcy. “Nightwing had a choice in becoming what she is. Tandy and Ty were forced. I don’t want to bring them into it.”

Jess jerks her head in a little _yeah, okay_ , and crushes another bit of glass.

“Why did Karen try to shoot Malcolm?”

“He gave me some bullshit about startling her.” Jess breaks the cigarette between two fingers, tosses the bits in the gutter. “She was out on the waterfront staring to sea like a fucking navy widow, apparently, and he and the kid—”

“There’s only three years difference between Malcolm and Santino, Jess, if he’s a kid so’s Malcolm.”

“Malcolm’s different.”

“Santino was beaten up by Russians and helped hack into Leland Owlsley’s files, Santino’s different too.” Darcy blows hair out of her eyes. “And considering they haven’t actually _done_ anything, so far as I know? You don’t get to be judgy.”

“They make eyes,” says Jess. “Santino shows up at the office sometimes and they make _eyes._ ”

“Like eyesex?”

“No, like—” She glares at the air like she wants to strangle it. “Like fuckin’—doe-eyed longing bullshit going on there. It’s a pain in the ass.”

“Yeah, well, they’ll probably keep doing that until Santino’s twenty-one. Malcolm’s a responsible guy, I’m pretty sure he’d feel skeezy if anything happened any earlier.” She’s not sure Santino will let that stand, but that’s a whole different kettle of fish. Darcy knocks into Jess’s shoulder. The hole in hers from the shotgun pellet has finally healed up enough that doing it doesn’t sting. “Keep up the good fight, Jones, you have another two and a half years to go.”

“Fuck you,” Jess says, and curls her shoulders in. “Goddamn—fucked up sufferpuppet fucktrumpet asshole. Fuck you.”

“You keep saying that, I’ll take you up on it.”

Jessica snorts. Her mouth turns down. “You could have called me, if things were that bad.”

“I didn’t think you’d be up for sharing squishy feelings.”

Jess gives her a deeply disgusted look. “I meant the fucking psycho with the sniper rifles.”

“Right.”

“Or the goddamn investigation into Patty Hearst The Sequel. It’s not like that’s my fucking job or anything.”

Darcy winces. “I told you, I needed—I needed something to do solo. And attorneys research.”

“My _fucking job_.” Jessica knocks her heel into the asphalt. She wavers. “Even if you didn’t need help, I’d still have—listened. ‘m shit at talking, don’t like it, but—I mean, you talk. A lot. Kind of fucking impossible to get away from you when you want to talk. So.”

 _Jessica Jones, you enormous softie._ Darcy tips into her for a second. “Frank’s not too bad. Surprisingly.”

“He tried to kill you.”

“He shot at me and beat the shit out of me. And I fucked up his knee and put him in the hospital. Now I’m helping him find out why his family’s dead. We’re even, at this point. And he’s growing on me. Like gangrene. Or athlete’s foot.” Darcy nudges Jess’s knee with hers. “I love you, Jess. You’re a good friend.”

“Don’t patronize me.” Jessica snaps another cigarette in half, pitches the pieces into the sewer grate. “You’re a prick.”

“Considering the penis did evolve from the clitoris, I am, yes.”

“Fuck you,” says Jessica, but her lips twitch just a little. “Don’t tell me gross science shit.”

“You telling me the human body’s gross?”

“Gross as shit.”

“Truth.” She peeks at Jess out of the corner of her eye. “If you want to help, though, I think—I think it’d actually be really good. I don’t think you’d be able to look into things that happened with Frank, since Reyes knows you and wants your liver on her dinner plate—”

“Fucking Cersei,” says Jess under her breath.

There’s a reason why she likes Jess Jones. “Yeah, pretty much. So the Castle thing might be a bust, but—but if you want to help it’d…be nice if we could have someone else keeping an eye on the yakuza.” 

“You mean those people at the tenement or the redheaded vampire?”

“You think she’s a vampire?”

“You think she isn’t?” Jessica peers at her sideways. “I dunno. I have some shit I’m working on. Might not have time.”

“Oh.” Darcy stares across the street at the tanning salon. “Okay. Yeah, of course.”

Silence, for a moment. Then Jess elbows her. “Dumbass.”

“You—” It clicks. Darcy elbows her back. “You’re a shithead, Jessica Jones.” 

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” She waves a hand. “I’m not good at organized crime, Lewis.”

“That’s because every time you meet a professional gangster you threaten to, and I quote—” Darcy clears her throat. “ _Rip you in fucking half and make you eat your own duodenum, dirtbag._ ”

Jess waves that off too. “I’m better with gritty shit. Pretty suits and gowns don’t fit well with me. And you’re _not_ borrowing Trish.”

“Wasn’t gonna ask.”

Jess knocks her knee back into Darcy’s, and stands up. “You’re a fucktrumpet.”

“Yup.”

“I can’t believe you’re making me get a fucking tetanus shot.”

“Come on, Superwoman, you can manage a tetanus shot.” Darcy catches the hand Jess puts down, yanks herself up. “Besides, if you run in sight of the hospital, Claire will hear about it, and if Claire hears about it, she will rain hell down on you like all the angels, and you will regret ever existing on this earth.”

Jessica kicks the top of the broken beer bottle into the street.

The cut’s a day old, and it’s long since stopped bleeding, but when Claire comes out of the back room (and hugs Darcy, which says a _lot_ about how worried Claire must have been to not have heard a word from them, and _wow, I’m still shit at this friends thing still even this far out of high school_ ) she takes one look at the thing, sighs through her nose, and says, “I didn’t want to spend my break stitching things, you two.”

“I don’t need stitches,” says Jess immediately. “Can’t afford them.”

Claire sighs through her nose again. “Still.”

“I’ll stitch them,” Darcy says, and drops her voice when another nurse wanders by. Louisa, from the Frank debacle. “I have a kit back at the office, that’s easy, just—tetanus.”

She tugs at the stethoscope around her neck. “How’d you get the cut?”

Jessica mumbles something under her breath.

“Christ, I get less backtalk from toddlers with dimes up their noses.” Claire jerks her head. “Come on, the pair of you. This way.”

Darcy’s been semi-aware of construction going on in Metro-General Hospital, but she hadn’t been aware that it was this extensive, or that it was this…well. Ditched. People ditched, she thinks, and taps an empty pain can with the toe of her shoe as Claire leaves them behind for about ten minutes to go smuggle a tetanus shot out of the hospital proper. People ditched and this place is a law suit waiting to happen if some patient managed to wander into the open construction area and fell and broke their neck. Like…so many law suits.

“Why no construction guys with nice asses working in here?” Darcy says, when Claire returns and bullies Jessica into taking off her coat. “Bless their hearts.”

“Hospital ran out of funding for the project, so it’s been put on hold.” Claire dabs an antiseptic wipe over Jessica’s arm. “Don’t be a baby, Jones.”

“That shit burns.”

“Suck it up,” says Claire, and jabs with the needle. “You’ve had worse than this. Anyway, hospital doesn’t have the funding to continue, so we’re stuck with it like this until someone makes a donation or until we get enough money in the bank to bring the construction guys back. Which is hilarious, because most of them were assholes.”

“Fun.”

Claire snaps her gloves off, and folds them around the spent syringe. “Should’ve figured it was past time for one of you to show up. It’s been a while since I had gaping wounds in my spare time.”

“Leave me out of this,” Jess says, and makes a face, rolling her shoulder. “Shit’s like oil.”

“Walk it off, Supergirl.” It’s fond, though. Claire leans back against the windowsill. “I figured you were all busy. Considering everything that’s been in the news lately, I’m not too surprised.”

Darcy picks underneath her thumbnail. “I mean, we come in to talk to Frank.”

“Yeah, to talk to Castle, sure.” Claire rolls her eyes. “I still haven’t heard a thank you for getting you in here through the back every other day, Lewis. You _or_ Karen.”

“Would it help if I said I worship the ground you walk on?”

“No.” She blows her hair out of her eyes. “You ever figure out that yakuza thing?”

“Working on it.”

“Lemme see your arm,” Claire says, and Darcy shucks her coat, too, giving it to Jess to hold. (“Not your damn coat hanger, Lewis.” “Bros don’t let bros get their coats dirty, Jones.”) The cut from the Commodore’s been healing nicely, thankfully, and everything else she’s had since has been fairly superficial. Still, Claire turns her arm from side to side and takes a long look at the cut before she pronounces it fine, “just don’t rub salt into it or get slashed again.”

“That wasn’t the plan.”

“I wonder sometimes.” She eyes Darcy through her hair. “Your face still looks like shit.”

“I thought the cut was healing fine.”

“You know that’s not what I meant,” she says. “Everything okay? You look like a steamroller just flattened you to fresh concrete.”

“That’s what I said,” says Jess.

“No, you called me a fucktrumpet, that’s different.” Darcy takes her coat back, and sticks her arms through the sleeves. “Just been complicated, that’s all. Sorry to go AWOL.”

“When aren’t things complicated with any of you?” says Claire, but it’s fond. “From the Punisher to the yakuza. And the Irish, from the sound of it.”

“The Irish shouldn’t be making any more noise for a while, at least not the Brannigan side.” Shit. Claire doesn’t know about Vanessa. Darcy wets her lips. “Hey, do you—did you already take your break, or no?”

“I’ve been here since five AM, my shift ends in an hour.” Claire folds her arms over her chest. “I don’t like that tone, Lewis. What’s going on?”

“You’re not going to like it.”

“Like…someone’s been shot level of not going to like it or someone died and you forgot to mention it not going to like it?”

“I mean.” She waffles. “No one’s actually hurt.” 

“Fine,” says Claire, and jerks her head towards the main part of the hospital. They have to cross back through Intensive Care just to get to the ER, and—shit. There are still holes in the ceiling from Frank’s shotgun. _Seriously, man, a fucking hospital._ “Just let me get my shit together. I haven’t taken lunch yet today anyway and they owe me an hour to myself.”

“Things in the ER still as bad?”

“Not as bad as they were when the self-proclaimed bad boy upstairs was running around, but worse than usual, yeah. I had a kid in this morning who’d somehow managed to shut his hand in an oven, if that gives you any idea.”

“So I’m not going to be eating at this late lunch,” says Darcy, “just as an FYI.”

“You deal with dead bodies on the regular, don’t gross out on me just because someone managed to burn themselves.” Claire nudges her in the side. “Give me five minutes, I’ll let my supervisor know I’m clocking out.”

“Take your time, rosebud.”

“Sure, honey bunches,” says Claire.

Jess makes an utterly revolted face. “I will puke on both of you.”

“If you do,” says Claire, “you get to clean it up, snuggle bunny.”

Jess flashes Claire the bird, and turns to stare at the wall, gluing her hands back into her kangaroo pocket. Darcy wonders sometimes whether there are magnets in Jessica’s hands, and she has to keep them in her hoodie pocket or some kind of alarm goes off. “You have somewhere to be, Jones?”

Jess shrugs. “Waiting for a call from Hogarth. She’s been ignoring me lately.”

“You piss her off somehow?”

“I piss everyone off.”

“Aww, babe,” says Darcy, and she gets the bird too. “If you haven’t eaten you could come with us.”

“You care?”

“Wouldn’t be asking you along if I didn’t want you to come, Jess, you know me better than that.”

Jess wavers. “I don’t—”

“Darcy?” says a voice, and holy shit, this is a day for running into people, apparently, because Father Patrick Lantom is standing at the end of the hall. He’s holding another batch of daisies in his hand. “And Jessica. This is—did something happen?”

“Just came to see a friend,” says Darcy, before Jess can open her mouth. “You here for Grote?”

“For Elliot, yes.” Father P sneaks a look at Jessica. “Been a while, Jessica.”

Jess shrugs, and curls deeper into her bomber jacket.

“Loquacious as ever,” he says, mildly.

“I don’t talk if I don’t have shit to say.” She ducks her head, peeps at Darcy. “Gonna go wait with the princess. If you’re buying me food.”

“Pretty sure you’re more flush with cash than I am right now, but if you order something off the dollar menu, whatever.” Darcy tips her head. “I _will_ pay for you to call Claire a princess to her face, however.”

“Fifty bucks.”

She sucks her teeth. “IOU?”

Jess scoffs. “Figures.”

She slinks off. Father P has the _just been knocked over the head with a shovel_ look on his face again that she usually only sees if she’s said something particularly startling or Tandy’s done something outrageous. Darcy cracks her knuckles absently. “What’s up, Father?”

“I didn’t—I mean.” He clears his throat. “I know that you hired her to investigate what happened to Ty, and that the pair of you know each other as—as colleagues, Tandy mentioned it, but I didn’t—think.”

“You knew that we know each other professionally but you didn’t know that we hung out?”

He shrugs, helplessly.

“We do,” she says, feeling like an echo. “We go drinking sometimes. Did I never tell you that?”

“Oh,” Father P says. _Knocked over the head with a shovel_ shifts to _I can’t believe what I’m hearing_ to _I will not comment through sheer force of will._ “Well, then.”

“Jess is great,” Darcy says, and hides her hands in her pockets. “No one else take your place on Grotto duty, yet?”

“I told you, Elliot was—very alone.” Father P shrugs. “It only takes an hour out of my week, and it—I like to think it helps. He had very few people even before what happened, and after, he had none.”

“You mean he had very few people outside of the Brannigans and the O’Shaughnesseys, and after they died, he had no one.”

Father P shrugs again, as if to say, _six of one._ Over his shoulder, she can see Claire sparring with Louisa, Jess haunting them like the sort of stray that hides beneath a dumpster, half in the shadows.

“You look better,” says Father P after a moment. Something relaxes around the set of his mouth, and it’s only then that Darcy puts it together that he’d been staring. “Like you’ve actually slept.”

“Yeah, uh, I’ve—kind of been confined to bed. Nothing happened, just—exhaustion.” Nobody would let her do anything but sit and read for three days, and she’d been climbing the walls at the end of it, but she’d also slept more in three days put together than she has since college, so that’s a thing. “I—um. I took your advice.”

“About?”

“Talking.” It sticks in her throat. “I, um. Talked to Matt. And to Foggy and Karen.” She finds Claire and Jess over his shoulder again. “Still—still kind of working on it, but…I did.”

“Oh.” Father P settles back on his heels, and goes all pleased, his eyes crinkling up at the corners. “Did it help any?”

“A—it helped a lot. Not—I mean, I’m still fucked up, kinda, but when am I not, y’know?”

“You,” Father P says, “are not the most messed up person I know, Darcy.”

“Like you have so many options to choose from.” She scuffs her shoe over the floor. How to say _thanks for whatever it is you said to my boyfriend last week_ without it being really, really weird? “Um, Matt said he—he talked to you.”

“Did he tell you about what?”

“No, but I think—I mean, it helped. A lot. So there’s another thank you.”

And another shrug, apparently. “Matthew had already worked most of it out himself, there was little for me to do.”

“You do a lot more for both of us than you actually know,” Darcy says. When Father P’s eyebrows shoot up, she ducks her head and stares at the tile. “I haven’t talked to Matt about it, much, but—you’re like our Obi-Wan. Kinda. And it’s—getting to talk to you helps.”

Father P doesn’t reply right away. He looks at her, and then at the wall, and then back at her, and to Darcy’s very great surprise she realizes he’s trying to figure out what to say. She plasters her eyes to the floor again, some part of her ricocheting back to being eighteen and telling Jen she’d been considering law school and seeing the look on her face, like her heart had grown three sizes. “Is this more of you sharing things?”

“Sort of.” _Be a grown-up, Darcy, come on._ “You’ve just done—a lot of stuff. And I don’t really know how to repay you for it. Or if I can, really, but—but I really appreciate it, Father. We both do.”

Father P’s already shaking his head before she can get halfway through. “Darcy, you don’t have to repay me for that, it’s not—” He clears his throat. “I don’t do any of this because of possible repayment, that’s not something you need to worry about.”

“But when it’s all so—”

“You two,” he says, not loud, or stern, or directive, but somehow angling his eyebrow in a way that she doesn’t dare try to argue with, “may have made certain things very—very complicated, in my life, I won’t deny that, but—” He stops, puts a thumb to his lip, considering. “But in other ways, you’ve—you’ve made the world a little bigger. In a way that I didn’t anticipate. And it’s complicated, yes, and occasionally—”

He gropes for a word.

“Exasperating?” says Darcy. “Frustrating? Agonizingly sleep-deprived?”

“Unpredictable,” says Father P. “It’s occasionally unpredictable. But I told you before, Darcy, I’d rather know than not. I’d rather be aware, and be able to help, and—and make it easier, if I can, then not know at all. I think the rest of your friends are the same.”

Claire puts both hands on Jess’s shoulder and shoves hard, and Jess _whines_ , loud as a teenager. She doesn’t mention the tetanus shot, thank fuck, but she whines, and Claire laughs, and all of a sudden Darcy’s vision blurs out. She stares hard at the floor, trying not to sniff too loudly or let her face get too red (which is a losing battle, goddamn), and when Father P reaches out and rests his fingers on her elbow, she hiccups a little.

“Sorry,” she says, and wipes at her eyes again. “Sorry, I’m—apparently it doesn’t take a lot to make me cry this week.”

“It’s okay.”

“I should—let you go see Grotto. I need to feed Jess before she bites someone.”

“I’ve been thinking,” he says, and Darcy stops, “about something you said, the last time we spoke. About how I was disappointed in you for everything that—that happened with Elliot.”

 _Shit, no, don’t remind me of that—_ “Um, I mean, that—”

“The only way I could be disappointed in you is if you became someone that I know for a fact you would never be,” he says. “Everything else that’s happened is irrelevant.”

Her throat closes up, and her nose burns. Darcy looks from the floor to the ceiling, anywhere but at Father P or at Claire or at Jess, and breathes until she can get a handle on the scorching in her eyes. When she looks at him again, he’s just kind of waiting, head tipped just slightly, and _God_ but he’s been talking to Matt too much if he’s doing that now, too. The image is so odd that a laugh catches and breaks in the back of her mouth.

“You gonna give me another flower?” she says, and Father P cracks a smile.

“Not unless you want one.”

“Not much of a daisy girl.” She wipes at her eyes. “I used to tear the petals off them instead of making chains, it made my kindergarten teachers nervous.”

“Flower crowns are fragile things, anyway,” he says. “They never last as long as you think they will. I always thought that if you were going to teach children to make crowns, make them out of wire. Teach them how to handle sharp edges and make something that lasts.”

“Somehow I don’t think a lot of schools would be up for the lawsuits that would come with kids poking their fingers with bits of metal.”

“No, but crowns made of steel wire last far longer than crowns made of daisies. Even if they’re more difficult to make.”

Darcy fusses with her sleeves. “That’s a metaphor, isn’t it?”

“Only if you want it to be,” says Father P more easily. “I should go upstairs before these wilt. And I think your friends are getting impatient.”

“Jess is always impatient if there’s free food involved.” She twists her fingers together. “I, um—I might be by. Soon. I need to replace all the coffee beans I used the last time I was in St. Patrick’s.”

“That was months ago.”

“Still.”

Father P’s eyes crinkle up. “As you like.”

Darcy salutes, and wanders away before she can do something stupid like squash the stuffing out of him in the middle of a shot-to-hell hospital hallway.

“Didn’t know you knew priests,” says Claire, once they’ve cleared the lobby. Jess kicks a Coca-Cola can off the sidewalk. “He comes in sometimes and visits people in long-term care. Nice guy. Kinda quiet.”

“Father P’s a friend,” says Darcy very quietly, and she can see it settling into place in Claire’s head, Catholic priest and Catholic boyfriend and confession and secrets, but all she says is, “Ah.” “He’s—he’s good people.”

Claire loops her arm through Darcy’s. “So where, exactly, are we having this awkward talk? Because the more or less public it should be dictates where the hell we go for food.”

“I just want a burrito,” says Jessica.

“I said a _dollar_ , Jess.”

“There’s a street vendor two blocks over who owes me for saving his ass from a carjacking,” says Jess. “I get all my shit for free.”

“And you were going to make me fork over a dollar? You wastrel.”

“And now I remember why I don’t spend time with you people,” says Claire. “All you ever do is bum money off each other and need me to keep you from turning yourselves inside out.”

“Awww, cupcake. You love us.”

“I’ll stab you,” says Claire, and turns her down the street.

It’s after—after she’s told Claire the truth, after Jess has split off to go work on something for Hogarth, after Darcy finishes at work and gets back to the apartment and settles in to nap for an hour before Lilith—that she finds the list of names shoved into her coat pocket, all in Claire’s spiky writing. She looks at them for a moment—six, this time—and then folds up the paper as small as she can get to slide it into the collar of her uniform.

.

.

.

The phone rings.

“ _Hai, moshimoshi,_ Tyler _desu._ ”

“Tyler _, ore da._ ”

“Kim, _doushita no. Isshuukan dattakedo nanimo kiitenakattakara shinpai shiteta._ ”

“ _Nandemonaissu_. _Tomodachi wa_?”

“ _Ahagondachi_?”

“ _Iya, chicchai tomodachitachi._ ”

“ _Mada irumitai._ ”

“ _Sou nara asobimashou ka_?”

“ _Asobu_?”

“ _Yakatomi made kinasai._ ”

“ _Kashikomarimashita_.”

.

.

.

By Friday, they’ve added only three more jurors, and Batzer is on the verge of becoming an Actual Living Knife Emoji and stabbing them all in the throat. It’s slightly intimidating, even for her. “If it keeps going like this,” she tells Matt on Sunday night, shoving her feet under his leg to thaw her toes back out, “the actual trial might not happen until next _year_ , let alone next month.”

“Mm,” says Matt, but that might be because her feet are freezing and he’s trying not to squeal like a toddler. His forehead’s gone all wrinkly, though, and he’s stopped sweeping his fingertips over the printed page, which means he’s…probably not listening. Or paying attention to anything at all. “Maybe.”

“If it takes until next year Foggy’s gonna have a mental breakdown and it’ll be messy.”

“Mm.”

Darcy watches him for a second. “Karen’s going to kill someone if it lasts much longer, too.”

“Mm.”

“I may possibly shove Reyes off the edge of the Grand Canyon.”

“Of course,” Matt says, and snags his coffee mug.

“Which would be a problem, because I would go to jail and you wouldn’t get to see me ever.”

“Mm.”

“I’m pregnant, by the way.”

She’s pretty sure coffee just came out his nose. Matt chokes, and Darcy steals the mug before he can drop it on all their files, holding it close to herself and blowing at the steam. She’s been getting much better at being able to drink undoctored coffee, since moving in with Matt. She steals his too often to not get used to it completely black. “ _What_?”

“I thought you were the human lie detector, Matthew, can you not hear the bullshit?” She prods at him with her big toe. “The IUD’s perfectly functional. I just wanted to see how much it would take to get your attention.”

Matt’s eyebrows contort into some kind of labyrinthine knot. “That,” he says, “was _cruel_.”

Darcy wrinkles her nose at him. “You’re talking to me.”

“I nearly had a damn heart attack.”

“Please. I’m pretty sure you’d know if I was pregnant before I did.” Which is incredibly odd to think about, but at the same time, it’s…sadly, kind of accurate. Without the IUD her period’s random enough that she honestly wouldn’t notice it vanishing for a few months at a time. It’s not unheard of. “What were you thinking about?”

The eyebrows unwind, just a little. Not a lot, but a little. “Things.”

“Things?”

Matt steals his coffee back, and sets it on the table. “Things.”

“That’s highly specific.”

“I know it is.”

His forehead hasn’t smoothed out yet. Darcy looks down at all the files on her lap, weighing heavy as dragon scales, as shields for knights errant, as boulders, and she shoves them all into a pile and leaves them on the coffee table. Then she confiscates the ones Matt’s searching through, and catches his hands when he goes to grab them back. “Hey. I didn’t mean to freak you out.”

“You didn’t. It’s fine.”

“Uh-huh.” She pets at a bruise on his knuckle with her thumb. “Still. We’re taking a break.”

“Without—”

“Nope.” She prods at him until his back’s pressed to the arm of the couch, until she can tuck herself between his knees and reorganize and settle with her spine to his chest and one of his arms pulled close around her ribs. She thinks, from the way he curls into it, that he might be fighting back a smile. “We’re taking a break. Break-time, no deep thinking faces.”

“It’s difficult to work this way, y’know,” says Matt, soft into her ear, and she turns her head just enough that she can catch the shadow of his eyelashes against his cheek. “I can’t read.”

“Seriously, you don’t know the definition of break.” She clears her throat. “ _Run away with us for the summer, let’s go upstate_.”

“Who’s the _us_ , here?”

“Me,” Darcy says. “And—I don’t know. All my issues. All the issues we have _between_ us. They could probably get some kind of gijinka body and we’d have a poltergeist to unleash on people whenever we wanted.”

“You worry me,” Matt says.

“So you won’t take a break and go to Albany with me?”

“You’d hate upstate New York.”

“You mean _you_ hate it,” says Darcy, “and just don’t want to leave the city.”

“I see no big difference.”

“What did upstate New York ever do to you?”

“Exist.” He scuffs his knuckle behind her ear, puts his mouth there for a moment. “I don’t know. I’m—worried. About Karen.”

Darcy tips her head. “Did something new happen?”

“Not exactly.” He tickles his lips to her ear again. “Well, I mean, nothing’s happened yet. She just—went to see Frank again, today. And it’s the fifth time this week.”

“Oh, God, Foggy’s infected you.” She drags his other arm around her, and pets at the thin skin on the inside of his wrist. “Foggy worries too much about Karen. As do you, by the way. She doesn’t—she’s not stupid or helpless, she doesn’t need to be managed.”

“She’s not doing great, lately.”

“I’m not saying she doesn’t need help,” Darcy says, carefully. “I’m saying she doesn’t need to be _managed_. Frank’s not going to do a damn thing to her. Other than maybe enable her into a coma, which we’re going to prevent. There’s nothing to worry about there.”

“Maybe.” He noses her hair. “That’s not the kind of worry I’m thinking about, though.”

“Then what kind of worry—”

“She might actually have feelings for him,” Matt says. “For Castle.”

A beat. Darcy tips her head forward, and shuts her eyes. “….fucking hell.”

“Mm.”

“I thought you said she didn’t.”

“I said I didn’t want to get involved. That’s different.”

 _Goddamn his hairsplitting._ “Are you sure?”

“I mean, it’s—yeah. I think so.”

“ _Fucking hell_.”

“It’s hard to tell, I don’t—I haven’t been in the same room with the pair of them since the start, so it’s difficult to say. But there are—” A sigh gusts out over her hair. “I mean. There are signs.”

“So you can tell when people are in love now? When did that happen?”

“I mean, I haven’t—not exactly, but—I haven’t explained this?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Great,” he says, half under his breath. “It’s difficult to gather secondhand, and if someone doesn’t acknowledge it to themselves it doesn’t always work the same, but generally, if—if you have feelings for another person, thinking about them, or being with them, or—or seeing them, it promotes physical reactions. Not just sweaty palms or a fast heartbeat, but—but temperature variations, shifts in breathing. Some people get tense when they weren’t before, some people relax. Voices will change, get deeper or higher or—or hoarser. And all those things individually, they could mean a lot of different things, but together it’s usually pretty indicative.”

“If someone acknowledges it,” Darcy echoes. “To themselves.”

“It’s why I had such a hard time reading you,” Matt says, plain as day. “Because—I don’t know. It could have gone a lot of different ways, what I was picking up from you. If you don’t—admit feelings, to yourself, they’re incredibly difficult to decipher. Even for—”

He stops.

“Even for Supersonic Hearing Man.” Darcy resettles, back against his chest. “So Karen, what, gets all sweaty-palmed?”

“No, but—her heart beats differently, it’s faster.” He sighs. “Her heart’s faster, she gets twitchier. She swallows more. Her skin gets—not hot, but it gets warmer, just…fractionally. Tangible but fractional. It’s difficult to explain.”

“I get it, it’s okay.” She hooks her fingers through his. “Could just be how passionate she’s getting about the case.”

“Could be.”

“But you don’t think it is.”

“She wasn’t like this with Fisk,” he says. “She—with Fisk she was scared, but she kept control. She’d flinch, she wouldn’t—” Matt stops. “Sometimes when she comes back from the hospital her fingers are shaking, just a little. That never happened with Fisk. Not even right after he tried to have her killed, she never shook quite like that. Back then it was adrenalin, not—whatever this is.”

“Doesn’t necessarily mean she has feelings.”

“One of those things on its own, no. Two or three, not proof. All of them at once?” He shrugs. “When people are—in love, or have strong feelings, their skin gets hot. It’s like—I don’t know. In my head, they kind of…glow. A little. A literal glow, not metaphoric, the temperature of their skin shifts up and their heart beats faster and they glow. It happens when people are angry, too, or upset, but with anger or turmoil it kind of rises and falls. Love is steady.”

“Love is kind?”

“Don’t be sassy.”

“Dude, that’s like asking me not to breathe.”

He just barely pinches her shoulder. “Karen’s not glowing, exactly, but she’s not running at her normal temperature, either.”

“She has a normal temperature?”

“Everyone has a temperature that’s normal for them.” He puts his mouth to her temple, thinking. “Your hands are always a little less bright because of circulation, but you’re generally pretty warm, always have been. Foggy’s in the normal range, Karen runs cool. For her to be as bright as she is lately, it means something. Though of course that’s not proof.”

“Oh.” Darcy muses over that for a bit. “I never thought about it in that way before.”

He laughs, silent through his nose. “First time I noticed it was right after I went blind. The—the physical stuff. I thought, you know. I thought it meant people were sick, that they had a fever. The way Stick talked about what it meant, all those things together, you’d think it wasn’t any better.”

“The more I hear about Stick, the less I like him.” She turns, brushes her lips to his jaw. “It just—sounds like he spent a lot of time trying to teach you how to be a machine, not a person.”

“He called it being a warrior.” Matt scuffs the edge of his thumb over her throat. “To him, it’s like—love is weakness. Human connection is weakness. Being remembered, being known, having friends or family, all of it’s a distraction. He said they’re soft things. Unnecessary comforts. If you let yourself have them, you’re doomed, because you have gaps in your armor. You have places where people can cut you. He called them bald spots, or bruises, or—I don’t know. Lots of things. After my dad died, it—didn’t sound completely insane, to live like that.”

 _Okay. No. Not okay._ She sits up, pivots, straddles his legs and faces him with her fingers splayed wide across his shoulders. “Like I said,” Darcy says, and Matt scuffs at her throat again with his forefinger. “It sounds like he was trying to make a legion of robots and counting on you being his lead robot minion.”

It’s a joke, but he’s not laughing. “Not entirely inaccurate, I don’t think.”

“I’m kind of sorry I didn’t actually clip him with that potshot, now.”

That, at least, gets her a smile. “He would’ve dodged.”

“Who the fuck tells a grieving ten-year-old that love is weakness?” Steam builds up in her head. “My mom used to tell me that people always left, and that, y’know, relationships are generally lies and never last and all this other shit, but that’s not the same as _love is weakness_.”

“I’m okay,” Matt says, and rocks forward to press his mouth to her hairline. “I figured out Stick was an asshole a long time ago.”

“It should never have happened at all, what the fuck were the nuns thinking bringing him in to see you?”

“They were only trying to help.” He traces the knobs of her spine. “Take a breath.”

“I’m angry.”

“I know.” Another kiss to her hair. “You’re drawling.”

 _Oops._ She breathes, in through her nose, out through her mouth. “Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize,” Matt says, oddly rumbly. “It just happened a long time ago.”

“Yeah, well, if he shows up again, I’m not going to be held responsible for the bones I break.” Darcy searches his face. “I’m really glad you’re not a robot.”

Matt sketches his thumb over her mouth.

“Why are you smiling?”

He tugs at her earlobe with two fingers. “You’re pretty bright right now, that’s all.”

Heat curls up her throat. “Don’t be cute when I’m mad.”

“I’m just saying you’re bright.” He brushes hair back out of her eyes, drops his forefinger to her sternum, pressing just above her heart. “Especially right here.”

“Really?”

“Mm.” He considers. “You’re glowing.”

“You’re being gross and sappy and not at all robotic again.”

“Sorry,” he says, in a voice that isn’t sorry at all, and tickles a finger to the hollow beneath her jaw.

“You’re really not.”

“Nope.”

Darcy peels a hair tie off her wrist and pulls her curls up, away from her face. “You really think Karen’s in love with him, don’t you?”

“Not in love, not exactly.” He crooks his forefinger through one of her beltloops, lets his eyes drift mostly closed. “Just—there are feelings, there.”

“What about Frank?”

“No idea.”

Because Frank still isn’t budging on the _I will only speak to Cat or Ma’am_ thing. “You think he could?”

“I’m not even going to try to pretend I have any way of knowing what Frank Castle will or will not do.”

“Probably safer that way.” Her bangs are getting too long again. “I need a haircut.”

He shifts a strand of hair out of her eyes. “It’d be safer.”

“Maybe.” She props her chin in one hand, rests her elbow on the couch pillow. “If she does have feelings it could be a huge problem.”

“Yeah.”

“Like a huge damn problem. For a lot of people.”

“I doubt she’d act on it. Karen isn’t stupid.”

“No, but I don’t want her heart to get broken.”

“I don’t think it’s that far, yet. It’s only been a few weeks.”

“This case is going to go on for at least another three months, Matt. People can fall in love that fast, we don’t all take years and years.”

Matt lifts a hand, catches a curl between his fingers and tangles it, absently. “Wasn’t years and years.”

She turns pink again. “Whatever, punky.”

“I swear to God you look like a sparkler sometimes,” he says, “here,” and he lifts his other hand to her heart. “Sparklers and fireworks.”

“You are singularly the most squishy person I have ever met in my life and it’s wonderful.”

“Squishy?”

“Cuddly works too.”

“At least that’s not as bad as noodly.”

“Quit arguing.” She turns her face and brushes her mouth over his knuckles. “Butterfly hands, yeah?”

“Haven’t heard that one in a while.”

“We’ve been kind of busy.”

“Mm.” He goes back to petting at her hair. “If it does wind up going that deep, then—I don’t know. Either Frank will break her heart, or she’ll do it herself by not saying anything at all.”

“You really think Frank would break it?”

“I don’t think he’d do it to be cruel, but—yeah, I think it’d happen somehow. Don’t you?”

Her first thought is _yes, Frank’s grieving; yes, the Punisher can’t afford feelings; yes, he’s going to jail, it’ll happen no matter what_. But—who knows. But something. “I don’t know.”

Matt’s eyebrows drag together, slowly. “You think he might feel the same way?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t think it’s impossible, that’s all I can say.” Darcy waits. “Does that bother you?”

“That the Punisher could have feelings for Karen?”

“When you say it like that it sounds strange.”

“This whole situation is strange.”

“This whole year is strange. This is just another tang to the weirdness flavor.” She pats at his chest, and leans back. “We should probably start working again. If this isn’t done by midnight Foggy will be the one in jail for murder.”

“If you want to sleep, you can. I can do some of it alone.”

“Nah, I’m fine. There’s coffee and depositions to sort through. You don’t need to worry about me.” 

Matt threads his fingers into the hair at the nape of her neck, and sways forward to find her mouth. Darcy meets him halfway, curling her hand into his shoulder. It’s a gentle thing, this kiss, slow and careful, and there’s a warm bloom all through her chest that spreads and blazes and nearly bursts through her skin when Matt strokes his fingers down the back of her neck, lifts his other hand to her cheek, breaks and breathes against her mouth. Darcy has to work to swallow, after, still close enough that her nose tickles.

“Sometimes I pity him,” says Matt, still leaning close. The words dust over her lips. “Stick.”

“I don’t.” Darcy rests her fingers to his cheeks, searches his face. “I don’t think a man who finds vulnerable children and uses their grief and fear against them is someone to be pitied.”

“Not that part, just—” He traces his lips to her palm. “That he doesn’t understand this.”

“Funnily enough, I still don’t pity him all that much.” She bites her cheek. “I can’t—I don’t forgive the way you do, Matt.”

When she settles her thumb to his lips, Matt says, “I don’t know how I feel about him.”

“Well.” She tucks her hair behind her ear. “I can still be angry, then.”

“Mm.”

Darcy tips her head. “What are you thinking?”

He shakes his head. “I don’t know. Just—you telling Stick to read Simone du Beauvoir is still one of my favorite memories.”

She snorts. “If _that’s_ one of your favorite memories I’m clearly not trying hard enough.”

“ _Twig, or whatever your name is_ —”

She catches him in the middle of a word, smiling, laughing, and Matt loops an arm around her waist and cinches her close into him, his hand creeping up the back of her shirt to pet at the cross at the small of her spine.

.

.

.

There are still three jurors left to go at the end of the day the next Friday, and they’re barely out of the courtroom and into the hallway when Darcy’s phone starts to buzz in her pocket. _Incoming call from: Katie-Kate._ “Go on ahead,” she says, and shifts Matt over to Foggy. “I’ll meet you outside, just give me a minute.”

“I want to talk to Angie about something first, but yeah.” Foggy salutes. “Good sailing.”

Darcy waggles her fingers at them, and starts off down the hall. “What’s up, Katie?”

“Hey, so.” Kate huffs over the line. “Can you come drink with me? Don’t get pissy about me not being twenty-one yet, okay, I just—need a drinking buddy right now.”

Darcy blinks. “I don’t—”

“One of my professors emailed me today to let me know that if I don’t show up to class tomorrow I’m going to fail her course.” She takes a ragged breath. “And, um. I think they’re gonna contact my dad soon, and I don’t—can you just come over? Please.”

Darcy shakes her sleeve back from her wrist, checks her watch. “I—yeah. Of course, yeah, just—gimme a bit to wrap this up, all right? It shouldn’t take me more than an hour.”

“Yeah, um—” Kate swallows, audibly. “Yeah, sure. Um, it’s at—at Hart Street and Sumner Avenue, in Bed-Stuy, so you can—yeah. Call me when you get closer, I can open a window.”

“I’m not coming in your window, baby girl.” Fuck. Her classes, _fuck._ “Just buzz me in the front, I don’t care about the rest of it.”

“You sure?”

“Positive.”

“Only fools are positive.”

Darcy says, “When have I ever not been a dumbass?”

“Don’t be stupid.” Kate sniffs. “And don’t call me baby girl.”

“It’s _baby girl_ or _Katie-Kate_ from now on, you get to pick.”  

“I should never have shown you _Wynonna Earp_ , it gave you some terrible ideas.” Another tremendous sniff. “Clint won’t care if you’re here, I don’t think, just—be careful when you come over. Please.”

“Of course. You want me to bring anything?”

“Booze?”

Darcy wavers. _Fuck it._ “Yeah, whatever. I get to pick whatever we’re drinking, I’m not in undergrad anymore and if you try to make me drink peach vodka again I’ll probably be sick.”  

“Sure, Jan.”

“Babe, I’m bringing you alcohol, don’t call me Jan.” She folds her fingers on her cell phone. “I’m so sorry, honey.”

“No, there’s—there’s been a lot, and I get why, and it’s not like I can, y’know, tell them what’s going on. I just, um—” Her voice wavers. “I’ve just never—failed a class. Before. Assignments, sure, and—and I’ve ditched and lied about why, but not—”

Not a full class. Not a fleet of classes. Not a semester. Darcy stares at the wall, at all the posters and the corkboards, takes in absolutely none of it. “I’ll be there in forty minutes, all right? I’ll take a taxi or something.”

“I can pay for the taxi,” says Kate, abruptly.

“No, it’s fine, seriously—”

“Darcy, I’m calling you out of work to come drinking with me, if you buy the alcohol I’ll pay for your goddamn taxi.”

The only reason she doesn’t argue is the crackling, the edge in Kate’s voice, popping like tinfoil. Darcy knocks her fist against the wall, carefully. _Suck it up, Lewis._ “Fine. I’ll text when I’m outside so you can buzz me up.” She wets her lips, and says, “It’s going to be okay, Katie. I promise you.”

“Don’t get soft on me now.”

“Since when am I soft?”

“Since always,” says Kate, fondly. “You’re a tribble, Darcy Lewis. You’re small and soft and fluffy and you purr when you get happy and you piss everyone off and make them love you in equal measure.”

“Ugh,” says Darcy, and hangs up on her.

Generally Darcy tries to keep away from the Avengers. Kate doesn’t—Kate’s a mini-Clint, or a maxi-Clint, or a Hawkeye or an Avenger-in-training or whatever the hell she is—but Darcy…fuck. Darcy has mixed feelings about the Avengers. Darcy’s had mixed feelings about the Avengers since 2012, and she’d been ushered away from her graduation from Columbia undergrad by emergency staff. She’d spent hours and hours in the dark with Matt and Foggy, scared out of her mind, not knowing if her sister were alive or dead, waiting for the terrible maw that had torn the sky apart to be closed, and she gets that the disaster she’d walked out into afterwards—some parts of that were unavoidable. That’s what happens, she thinks, when aliens come from the other end of the universe and try to tear apart one of the busiest neighborhoods in one of the densest cities on earth. But _Christ._ She’d spent weeks—months—afterwards volunteering with the Red Shirts, wandering around, shifting stone and mortar and wood, and the grudge had settled deep into her marrow, twining around her bones like Devil’s Snare. She’s heard about Clint—everyone’s heard about what happened to Clint after the SHIELD infobomb—and in the grand scheme of things he’d done the least damage, but…shit. She has mixed feelings about the Avengers, who seem to be real damn good at breaking things and not about cleaning them back up again, and she had mixed feelings about SHIELD—still has mixed feelings about SHIELD, even after Widowgate, because SHIELD had put the whole city on lockdown to collect all the alien crap, and left the wreckage of Hell’s Kitchen and Midtown just…standing there, untouched, bodies rotting in the rubble, children and animals screaming in the dust. She’s never going to forgive them for that.

The only one she’s even come close to forgiving outside of Clint Barton—and she can’t really believe she’s even thinking this—is Tony Stark. Tony Stark, the man who took down a goddamn space whale and nearly destroyed an entire city block, who is also Tony Stark, the man who’d quietly poured millions and millions of dollars into clean-up, who’d rewired half the city with green energy and never asked for payment, and who’d never once used any of it as a press gimmick, never said a damn word about it outside of _donate here, jackasses._

(The bitterness is still there, because somehow most of Stark’s money went to fixing expensive Midtown high rises, and not tenements on 49th Street, but it’s not as strong as it could be.)

So. Outside of running into Clint when he collects Kate at random for Hawkeye things, and occasionally seeing Stark electronics in department stores, she’d really rather have no contact at all with the Avengers Initiative. Not with Stark, or with Rogers (who Kate doesn’t ever really mention, come to think of it); not the Black Widow or Scarlet Witch or the Hulk, not any of them, really, because when she actually stops to think about it she can see footage of Sokovia, and there’s the earth shaking around her again, asbestos hanging on the back of her throat, and her temper gets all squirrely, and yeah, it’s really wiser that she just avoid them.

Not to mention the fact that they’d probably have extreme issues with her methods, even if Clint’s kind of just waved his hand and gone _whatever, girl._ Then again, Clint Barton doesn’t have the most shining track record. _Budapest_ , that’s all she has to say.

What all of that salt means, essentially, is that she’s never been to Clint’s place in Bed-Stuy before. Kate had told her it was in Brooklyn a long time ago—that Hawkeye lives in Brooklyn and Captain America keeps a place in Washington Heights will never not make her snicker, honestly—but she’s never actually _been_ here. It feels a little like Kate and Elena’s building in the Kitchen, worn but clean, but on the other side of the street two men in tracksuits and sunglasses trade a cigarette back and forth, chattering in Russian. She can feel their eyes on her back as she texts Kate, and the buzzer goes off.  

“There are people watching this building,” she says, when Kate lets her into the right apartment, and flips all three of the deadbolts again. “In case you didn’t already know.”

“Those would be the tracksuit Russians.” Kate’s eyes are red and swollen. Her toenails are painted plum, and there’s a gash on her knee from something or other, asphalt or concrete or gravel, Darcy’s not sure. “I think they’re waiting to see if I’ll come out.”

“They know you’re in here?”

“No, that’s why they’re waiting. They know better than to actually come onto the property.” She folds her bare arms across her chest, and hooks one ankle around the other, not meeting Darcy’s eyes. “What’d you bring, tribble?”

“If you actually want any of this you have to stop calling me that.” She puts the bag on the kitchen counter. “Ice cream,” she says. “Coffee flavored because reasons. Also rum, nice rum, not cheap rum, which through some miracle was on sale today. Coke, too, just in case, but if you want to be gross and drink it straight we can do that too.”

“I thought you said you weren’t an undergrad anymore.”

“It’s not like we’re going to be drinking it out of a pair of Dixie cups.” Though there are dishes in the sink that need to be dealt with. That’s for later. Darcy tosses her coat onto the counter too, and sweeps Kate up into a hug, pretending not to hear the way Kate’s voice catches in her throat or notice the way she buries her face in Darcy’s shoulder, how her breathing hitches and sticks. “Fuck the yakuza.”

“I haven’t heard a single damn helpful thing from those bugs,” Kate says, muffled into Darcy’s suit coat. She heaves air, and straightens again, yanking away. “If I had that’d make things easier but I just—fucking hell.”

“ _Fuck_ the yakuza.” Darcy catches her by the arms before she can flee. “Have you heard from your dad? Or Sarah?”

“No, but it’s only a matter of time.” She twirls a finger in the air. “The question is if my dad’ll hear first or Sarah, considering how out of the loop they both are most of the time. If my dad hears first there’ll be yelling and if Sarah does there’ll be yelling and crying and I just want both of them to fuck off. Like yesterday.”

“You could turn your phone off.”

“If Elena calls I want to be able to hear it. And I was texting Miles earlier, too. Not about this, just about the tenement and stuff.” Kate nudges at Lucky, lying sprawled out on the couch, and tucks herself into the pillows, drawing one knee up to her chest and watching Darcy putter around the kitchen, looking through cabinets. “Plus Jess is watching the Commodore, so if McClintock comes back, she’s going to call and let me know.”

“Ah,” says Darcy, and drags a cup out of the mess that is the sink.

“I mean, Dad’s coming back to the city in like two weeks for that fundraiser thing, so it’s more likely he’ll find out first.”

“I can be there, when you meet him. If you want.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I want to,” Darcy says. “Your dad’s an asshole, Katie. I’ll fight him if you don’t want to.”

“You want to fight everyone,” Kate says, but her lips are twitching. “And you just spent three days locked in your apartment because you worked yourself into exhaustion, I’m pretty sure Aramis would kill me if I let you fight my father.”

“Actually I think Matt’d be cool with me fighting your dad, since mostly it’d be me yelling a lot and maybe throwing potted plants. _He’d_ want to fight your dad if he knew half of the shit the guy says to you.”

Kate grunts. “Maybe.”

She yanks another cup out of the sink, and wrinkles her nose at the crash of plates. “Oops.”

“Don’t break anything.”

“I totally didn’t.” Darcy undoes her button-down, leaves that on the counter too so she’s wandering around in a tank top and bandages. “Matt loves you, Katie. You’re like his little sister, he’d definitely fight your dad for you.”

“Would he sell my father to Satan for one corn chip?” says Kate, in a quivery voice. “Or is that asking too much of a good Catholic boy?”

“Debatable.” Darcy wrinkles her nose. “You are such a damn undergrad. Look at this, I think there’s something growing in this sink.”

“There is not. I just haven’t done dishes yet.” Kate rolls her eyes. “Don’t look like that.”

“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m so glad I’ve passed twenty-three and realized that a clean kitchen is worth all the effort.” She washes out the second cup, and scrounges around for a dishtowel. “What class was it?”

“Crimjust.”

 _Oh, honey._ “As soon as this is over I can help you appeal it. We’ll figure out an excuse that works, okay?”

“Yeah, I know.” Kate nudges Lucky again until he settles with his head on her stomach. She digs her fingers into his ears. “It just feels like shit.”

“So,” says Darcy. “You want Coke with your rum, or no?”

“Surprise me.”

She gets rum with her Coke, instead, which Kate tolerates with only the slightest amount of bitching. Darcy ferrets out an unopened bag of potato chips, bitches out the entirety of the Barnard administration, badgers Kate into putting on an episode of _Lucifer_ while she cleans the kitchen, and finally settles onto the other end of the couch with a bowl of coffee ice cream and Lucky’s hind end leaving golden retriever hair on her work skirt.

They’re more than halfway through the second episode when Kate’s computer chirps. “ _—nachattandesuga_ —”

“Shit.” Kate shoves at Lucky’s head. Lucky, bless his goddamn heart, rolls around and clambers all the way into Darcy’s lap, despite being big enough to bear a small child to the North Pole. All the air goes out of her lungs. “Sorry.”

“Is that the bug?”

“Yeah, I have my computer running all the time just in case.” She hits pause on Tom Ellis’s face. “Sorry to you, too, Luci.”

“Is that McClintock?”

“I would guess, it sounds like her. Shut up.”

Darcy shuts up. She takes a photo of Lucky, texts it to Jen— _this is why you can’t get a dog; dogs have no concept of weight and space and smell_ —and watches as Kate plugs in her headphones, presses them over her ears and mouths along. The program on the screen jumps and ripples like a heartbeat monitor.

Kate doesn’t have to say when it happens. She goes still, and Darcy thinks: _I’m probably getting back late, tonight._ She texts Karen, Foggy. Makes a mental note to call Matt. By the time Kate’s groping for a pen, for the sticky notes she has set up on the coffee table, she’s texted Jess, too, with her burner phone. _Might have a fight for you, hold on a sec._ It’s less than a minute before Jess texts back a simple _k_ , and Darcy watches in silence as Kate scrawls out a few numbers, a street. She peels the post it off the bundle, and keeps on listening.

It’s another five minutes before she finally takes her headphones off.

“What?”

“They’re bringing something in tonight,” she says. “Or that’s what McClintock says.”

“Where?”

“Train yards.” Kate rolls off the couch, pads down the hall. Darcy pushes hard at Lucky until he shifts his head. “She and Kim are both going to be there. She didn’t say what it was, exactly, but if they’re both gonna watch it come in, then—”

“No sign of Hiroshi?”

“No, he’s staying out for now.” She strips off her tank top, her back turned to Darcy. Darcy turns to look out the window. “The Ahagons will be there though. They want all hands on deck.”

“If it’s something that important, why are we only hearing about it now?”

“McClintock’s barely ever in the hotel room, and Jess can never get close enough to hear anything without letting the woman know we’re tailing her.” Kate yanks on a sport bra, pulls her hair free again. “You might want to stay out of this one. You’re still tired, and the yakuza freak you out, don’t lie and say they don’t.”

“Of course they freak me out. Their fearless leader tied me to a chair. That doesn’t mean I’m sitting around.” Darcy brushes dog hair off her skirt. “Did they say anything else?”

Kate hesitates over the leggings of her uniform, wavers.

“Kate,” says Darcy. “What else did they say?”

“The Black Sky,” Kate says. “They said this had something to do with the Black Sky.”

She looks at her hands, and they’re still. Darcy breathes, in and out through her nose.

“Darcy?” says Kate, in a very small voice. “Are you okay?”

“Fine,” Darcy says, and in the back of her head she thinks: _whale shark._ “Just—prepping for the inevitable.”

“Which is?”

“You and Elektra ruling the world,” says Darcy, and hits one on speed dial.


End file.
